Religious Communities of iJtl en in Texas
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t,f San Antonio, who invited them to give a mission in the old Cathedral of San Fernando. So impressed was the Bishop, who attended the mission personally, that he immediately solicited from the Superior of the Order in Mexico, the Very Reverend Ramon Prat, Fathers to take charge of the Cathedral of San Fernando. A large portion of the Spanish-speaking in the city were members of this old parish .that dates back to 1731. Father Superior Prat did not hesitate to make a sacrifice for the hun- dreds of Spanish-speaking who clamored for ministration in their own tongue in distant Texas. Although short of Padres for the boundless field in Mexico, he sent Fathers Camilo Torrente, C.M.F., and Leon Monasterio, C.M.F., to organize a community to take care of San Fernando Cathedral Parish in San Antonio. The two Spanish missionaries were, in a sense, not strangers. Within the walls of old San Fernando Spanish missionaries had labored years before. They had come more than a century before, like the Claretians now, to teach the fundamental principles of Christianity and bring the comforts of Religion to the faithful. Their enthusiasm revived the faith of old San Fernando, the first parish church established within the present limits of the State of Texas, recently elevated to the dignity of a Cathedral. It is not strange that the Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary should have decided soon after their arrival to found a community and to build other churches where they could tend to the increasing number that flocked day after day to hear the word of God preached in their own tongue. Within two years they built the parish house of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, where in 1911, a new parish was formally instituted on August 15, by the Most Reverend John W. Shaw, Bishop of San Antonio. This new parish was destined to become the Mother Parish of the American Province of the Claretian Fathers. Here in 1923, a new Province of the Order, independent of Mexico, was established with Papal approval. The zest of the Claretians moved them to found the parishes of Our Lady of Guadalupe and of St. John the Evangelist, and even to care temporarily for the parish of San Alfonso. Not satisfied with working in the city, they soon carried their labors beyond its confines. Within a few years they were caring for more than forty chapels and missions within and without the City of the Alamo. Mindful of the importance of teaching the young, they did not neglect education in the midst of their missionary endeavors. They kept up the San Fernando Parish School, one of the best attended in the city, and in 1924, they began a drive for funds to build a new school in the parish of
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