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Retired Santa Rosa Bishop Daniel Walsh leads prayer at a blessing of San Francisco's St. Anne School marking the school's 100th anniversary Jan. 6. At left is St. Anne pastor, Father Daniel Nascimento. (Photo by Dennis Callahan/Catholic San Francisco)
Jan. 6, 2020
Tom Burke
Catholic San Francisco
San Francisco’s St. Anne School celebrated its 100th anniversary with a blessing during the school’s morning assembly Jan. 6, the school’s first day in session for 2020. Retired Santa Rosa Bishop Daniel Walsh, an alumnus of St. Anne, presided at the Jan. 6 rites and will be principal celebrant of a Centennial Mass Feb. 2 at 11 a.m. at St. Anne Church. Bishop Walsh now makes his home at St. Anne.
More than 70,000 students have attended St. Anne in its 100 years Father Dan Nascimento, St. Anne pastor, told Catholic San Francisco.
“St. Paul in today’s reading uses the image of a garden to help us appreciate what we sometimes take for granted,” Father Nascimento said in a homily at the Jan. 6 school blessing. “In essence he’s saying, how does a garden grow? Well, it begins with someone planting the seed, but then others have to water it.”
The same is true for St. Anne School he said. “Your parents can send you here, your teachers can teach you, and you have to study, but how you learn and grow is a beautiful mystery. How our brains are able to remember, to absorb and apply it in life, is God’s gift to us. So we acknowledge all the people who helped make the school great, parents, teachers, students, but we also have to thank God. And so we ask the Lord to bless you and our whole school that it may help you and many others to follow, to learn, to grow and to use what you’ve learned wisely so we can care for our Mother Earth and care for our worldwide family.”
Bishop Walsh in remarks leading up to the St. Paul readings said: “The parishioners of St. Anne Church, over a 100 years ago, wanted to build a school where children can learn not only how to read and write, how to add and subtract, but also to give them good values to live by, as children of God. They wanted you to grow so that your minds may be filled with knowledge, but your hearts may also be filled with love and compassion to make our world a better place. But this wasn’t just the work of one person, it took many hands and hearts, who labored not just one day, or one year, but every day of every year for the past 100 years.”
A prayer of blessing concluded the Jan. 6 service:
“Heavenly Father, we can only plant and water the seed. Only you can cause the seed to grow. So we humbly implore your blessing upon our school. Because without your grace, our efforts will be in vain. Only You can take what our teachers teach, and what our students learn, to touch and transform our minds and hearts. Only you can help us use what we learn to bless others and our Mother Earth. So let Your Spirit come upon our School, let Your Spirit fill our classrooms, the hearts of our teachers, our students and parents, that we may grow in knowledge, wisdom and grace and become a blessing to our own family and our worldwide family. We ask this through Christ our Lord.”
Remembered at the prayer service was the wife of St. Anne principal Tom White, Joan White, who died Jan. 1, and whose funeral Mass was celebrated Jan. 6.
Visit https://stannesf.ejoinme.org/100years.