It is my great pleasure to welcome you to San Miguel School. When you baptize your children, you promise to raise your child in the Catholic faith. A wonderful way to fulfill this promise is to enroll your children in San Miguel Catholic School. This is a wonderful option that you should consider, because our teachers are not only teaching the basics of a good education, they are also teachers of the soul. We live in a world where Faith and Morals have slipped off the charts and the world has become the judge of what is good, right, and just according to “what feels good” and “what is best for me” even if it is contrary to the Gospel of Jesus. At San Miguel School, we believe that the children deserve better. Working together (priests, sisters, teachers, and parents) we can build a school and a community that not only preaches Gospel values, but tries to live them out as well.
In recent decades there has been a change in the way we understand and celebrate our faith. The Church teaches that there is a profound connection between our worship and our work in the world. We teach it at San Miguel School, and so, we join in the parish life, because we are a community, a parish school. We gather in the church building weekly to celebrate Christ’s presence among us, to be forgiven and strengthened, to be nourished by Word and Sacrament, and then to be sent out. The parish is the place where our faith is celebrated – both in liturgy and in action.
Our parish has a long history of 93 years. The first mass was celebrated in December 1927. Bishop John J. Cantwell dedicated the Church of San Miguel in 1928, in the center of Mexican district of Watts. The church was built with the support of the parish of Santa Cruz. A year later, the Augustinian Recollect priests, from Spain, were assigned to the parish. In 1962 the hall was built, which would serve to teach catechism. On September 6, 1966, San Miguel School opened its doors for the first time, with 110 students, served by the Sisters of the Love of God, who led the school until 1983, when the first lay principal was named. In the beginning, 1st to 4th grade education was offered, but soon the program was expanded through eighth grade, and now we have also added kindergarten and transitional kindergarten. In 1988, the Agustinian priests left the parish and Cardinal Roger Mahony entrusted the pastoral care of the parish to the Mexican community of Misioneros del Sagrado Corazon y de Santa Maria de Guadalupe. The Sisters of the Presentation also arrived in the community around the same time. Both congregations have served the community since then to the present. The Sisters of the Presentation founded the Presentation Learning Center for adults, in the building that was formerly the convent.
Together we have built what is now San Miguel Parish and San Miguel School. Please join us whenever and however you can in our liturgies, our parish celebrations and in our ministries to the wider community. Share your talents and gifts with God’s people here so that all of us may better understand and do God’s will. May God bless us all on our pilgrimage of life. After we have lived our faith well on earth, may we all be brought together again around the table of the Lord in Heaven.
In the Heart of Jesus’ Love,
Fr. Oscar Contreras, MSC, Pastor