Creati01i of a Secttlar Clerg·y
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lived Seminary of St. Mary, in Galveston. What passed through his mind now one may well imagine. Present, too, besides hundreds of Catholics, were officials of the city and the county, as well as the United States and the Army. For the Oblates the year proved a memorable one. Before the end of 1903, they also established the second separate and independent Province of the Southwest, with headquarters in San Antonio, to care for the missions in this vast area and Mexico. Saint Anthony's Theological Seminary decided to add an Apostolic school for boys in 1906. Father Albert Antoine was Rector at the time and opened a school at St. Anthony's where boys could make their High School studies in preparation for entering the seminary course. It was then that the college came to be known as St. Anthony's Theological Seminary and Apostolic School. To the high school students and their parents it was more generally known as St. Anthony's College. For almost ten years St. Anthony's Seminary was the training center for Oblate and diocesan students for the priesthood. Two years after its founding, a Minor Seminary department was added. By 1912, with a new Diocesan Seminary being contemplated, St. Anthony's was limited to Oblate students, who continued to come in ever-increasing numbers "from the four comers of the country." This necessitated a reorganization, which took place in 1920, when the Philosophers and Theologians were placed in a separate Major House of Studies in Castroville, leaving St. Anthony's free to care for the constantly increasing enrollment, which tripled by 1930. The House in Castroville grew too small in time for the advanced students in the Major Seminary. In 1927, they were finally moved to the modern and spacious new De Mazenod Scholasticate in San Antonio, so appropriately named after the Founder of the Congregation and great friend of Bishop Odin, whom he tried to help found the first Seminary in Texas back in 1853. By 1936, the year of the Texas Centennial, the first wing of an entirely new plant was erected to meet the growing needs of the seminary-college. The Second World War prevented the completion of the new plant, which was resumed in 1948 and completed in 1949 on the centennial year of the Oblates in Texas and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Diocese of San Antonio. It is a fitting monument undreamed by the founders of St. Anthony's Seminary in 1903. 59 Over 250 of its students have become active Oblate missionaries, and not a few have swelled the ranks of the diocesan clergy. One of its early 59Archdiocese of San Antonio, Diamond Jubilu, 1874-1949, p. 88.
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