January 26, 2022

Who has not ever closed their eyes and seen at the end of the sunny road the lost paradise of their childhood? Who has not seen themselves as a child, playing happily with their classmates, running and laughing, sharing recess time?

I invite you to close your eyes again this afternoon and walk the golden path that leads to childhood. There, at the end of the road, is for many of us this patio, surrounded by the buildings that build our Princess school. Here students and former students have been happy and enjoyed themselves after classes, playing soccer and dodgeball, jumping rope or doing childish acrobatics between the rubber bands, losing sweaters (and even heads) after sweating buckets.

The girls have taken kilometers of peripatetic walks while dodging the balls of the soccer-playing children, and everyone, boys and girls, have shared in this yard the sandwich, the games and the confidences, they have had fun preparing the stalls of the Girl Mary, eating sweets until they are stuffed, making the little ones happy with the dances and the dizzying changes of costumes in the proclamation of the festivities, dancing at the festival to the rhythm of the music and the fashions that have passed through this school for more than 125 years.

The students who are about to leave school go out to the patio every year, on their graduation day, and go around and around, as if they never wanted to leave it, and consecrate themselves before the Virgin that the little ones carry in procession during the Rosary in the month of May. How many rosaries have been prayed in this patio! How many nuns and teachers have loved their children and have been moved by them to see them turn each day of the week into a happy party as if it were Sunday! How many parents have seen their children grow up and have a blast here! And meanwhile, our Lady of the Patio has always looked at us from her grotto with maternal and protective love.

Today in the usual patio, dressed in new colors, brand new and renovated, we ask the Lord to bless the echoes of all the happy stories lived here and even some sad hours. We ask you to bless this patio and all the stories that have already begun to be written in it and those that have not yet been even imagined; We ask you to bless the joy of being a child, the love that is placed in each student who is educated, the hope that is placed in them as a promise of a flowering land.

And to our Immaculate Mother, we ask her not to leave this patio, to stay here to continue looking at the soccer boys and the peripatetic girls, at the teachers who are excited and fall in love with their work, at the parents who love their children so much and who entrust their education to this center every year, at the nuns who ensure that the work dreamed of by Saint Carmen Sallés is preserved. May she continue to watch over our Conceptionist children, flowers of this blue garden that is our patio. May it be a reflection of another higher one and may God bless us all forever and ever.

Amen.