Our Ca.tltolic Heritage in Texas
alumni, the Most Reverend Laurence J. FitzSimon, became the third Bishop of Amarillo, in 1941. On the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of St. Anthony's, Bishop Fitz- Simon said: "While there San Antonio grew into a great city, so also St. An- thony's grew, not in multiplicity of buildings, but in the new plantings that year by year were brought up with the promise of vigorous maturity. One does not usually find the sturdy oak or the towering pine on the lands of the nurseryman. . .. It is elsewhere that they reach their maturity; yet it is the care and selection of their early growing years that insure their later development in another soil or climate.... Year after year young men left for the Novitiate and then to final studies in the Scholastic.... To St. Anthony's have come hundreds to give their souls a trial, and hundreds experienced the strength of that im- pulse that eventually brought them to the priesthood. Besides the lesser number that found their way leading to the secular clergy or to some other religious congregation, over 250 lived their apprenticeship here, in the school of the Master...." 60 St. Jo/m's Seminary in San Antonio, 1915. Rightly has it been said of the Most Reverend Bishop of San Antonio, John William Shaw, that "His greatest contribution to the Diocese was the founding of St. John's Seminary in 1915." He came to Texas from Mobile, Alabama, in 1910, as Bishop Coadjutor to Bishop Forest-then seventy-one years old-with the right of succession, and became the fourth Bishop of San Antonio in March 1911, upon the death of Bishop Forest. He shared with his prede- cessor a burning desire to develop a native clergy. Convinced that the future of the Church in Texas lay in the fostering of native vocations, he spared no means in encouraging vocation in his Diocese. Shortly after his arrival, while still Coadjutor, he issued a Pastoral Letter in December, 1910, in which he said, "It is our intention whenever possible to take the young men of our Diocese for the ministry; the grace of a priestly vocation is for them as well as for the youths of other lands.'' 61 Although St. Anthony's had met the most urgent need in the past by accepting the seminary students of the Diocese and thus served as a semi- diocesan Seminary, Bishop Shaw, later to be elevated to the Archiepiscopal See of New Orleans, felt strongly that the Diocese needed its own, separate 60Most Reverend Laurence J. FitzSimon, "Address· on the Occasion of the Golden Jubilee of St. Anthony's Seminary," Southern Messenger, San Antonio, Texas, May 7, 1953. 61Cited In Archdiocese of San Antonio, Diamond, Jubilee, 1874-1949, p. 184.
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