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Jesus cum Maria sit nobis in via!

The words of this Latin prayer – May Jesus with Mary be with us on the road! – were drilled into the memory of every student blessed to be in Monsignor Richard Lopez’s junior-year theology class at St Pius X Catholic High School in Atlanta, GA. Monsignor Lopez was a gentle, saintly soul who made few insistent demands on us, but this prayer was one of them. We should say this prayer, he implored us, every time we got behind the wheel of a car, as it would ensure the guidance of our Lord and Lady as we traveled on the way – and as new drivers on the streets of Atlanta, we all certainly needed it. 

Such was Monsignor’s influence on us that most of my schoolmates and I continue to say the prayer every time we get in the car, and I have shared it with my children and my own students as well. (If your children have ever been on a field trip with me, perhaps they will recall it!) But it wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned it wasn’t Monsignor Lopez’s prayer after all – it was Christopher Columbus’s. This discovery came when I was in graduate school studying American Catholic history, particularly the impact of 19th- and 20th-century immigration on the Church in America. In researching the legacy of Christopher Columbus, I learned that Columbus, a man of deep and pious faith, either began or ended almost all of his letters with these words – Jesus cum Maria sit nobis in via! 

In my studies I also learned that Columbus Day was founded by Italian Catholic immigrants in the early 20th century who, in the wake of anti-Catholic bigotry, wanted to affirm their right, as heirs to the Italian explorer, to be welcomed as full participants into the United States. For many American Catholics, Columbus’s legacy gave them a stake in the history and the future of the nation. Far from simply being a day to honor a heroically courageous but also deeply flawed man, Columbus Day at its origin was intended primarily to strike a blow against religious bigotry and to celebrate religious freedom. These little tidbits of knowledge generated a small metanoia for me, reshaping both how I thought of the prayer Monsignor Lopez had taught me and how I saw my country and its Catholic heritage. 

I still remember the delight I felt as a graduate student in encountering Monsignor’s prayer in Columbus’s writings, and I used to wish that Monsignor had shared with us this backstory. But now that I have followed Monsignor’s footsteps as a Catholic school educator (and in large part due to his inspiration), I have begun to understand his prudence in withholding the full picture. Wisdom takes time to blossom. Knowledge is food for the mind and soul, but food must not be eaten gluttonously, nor is food appropriate at one stage of life proper for another. If Monsignor had over-explained the prayer, likely the story would have gone in one ear and out the other, and I would have been deprived of the joy of discovering it on my own. A wise teacher knows just how much to feed his students and when.

I think in many ways my engagement with Columbus’s prayer – learning it as a teenager, discovering its origin as a graduate student, and subsequently sharing it with my own students as a teacher in turn – is a microcosm of the kind of education we endeavor to practice here at St Benedict. We introduce our students to good and beautiful things – to prayers, yes, but also to art and music, to inspiring stories in literature, to men and women striving for nobility throughout history. We know that in their short time with us we will never be able to teach them everything; we give them what we can, in due measure. But we hope to lay a strong foundation, so that when they go out into the world and, in their future lives and studies, encounter, say, a figure from history or a work of art, they can greet it with a cry of recognition – I’ve seen you before! – and delight in getting to know it more deeply at each stage of their lives, experiencing those moments of metanoia that enable them to see their world with new eyes. We also hope that, in the process, they will grow more deeply connected to their own tradition and to others throughout history who have shared these moments of encounter and transformation. And we hope that they will be inspired to share that tradition with future generations through their own lives and witness.

Today, the prayer Monsignor Lopez taught me exists in a constellation of disparate connections, both personal and intellectual, that I call to mind each time I get in the car and recite those words. There in my recollection are Columbus himself, penning those words as he embarked on his voyages across the sea; the legacy of American Catholics in this country who fought to preserve their faith; my classmates who learned the prayer with me; the students to whom I have taught this prayer myself; and Monsignor Lopez, who inaugurated me into this “great tradition.”

And now the St. Benedict community is gathered into this prayer. Our own school will, in just a few weeks, embark on a quite literal journey up the road into our new building. There, we will continue our intellectual journey of imparting the great tradition to our students and instilling in them the virtues they need to bear witness to their faith as our forebears did. As we pursue all of these paths, Columbus Day gives us a providential opportunity to pray in his words: Jesus cum Maria sit nobis in via!

AUTHOR: Karen Celano, Director of Curriculum

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