History, Part 4

St. Catherine’s

This page is under construction.

I NOTICED WHILE assembling this page that nearly everyone today, including newspaper editors, gets the school’s name wrong. The original name, which judging from recent documents is still the legal name, is St. Catherine’s Industrial Indian School. Nowadays almost everyone omits the word “industrial.” Maybe people do this because they don’t know what “industrial” meant when applied to schools in the nineteenth century. It meant “vocational.”

The same thing has happened with Rosario Chapel. Everyone calls it that, even the church officials who created the sign in front of it, as if it were named for the rosario (rosary in English, a method of prayer). But it wasn’t named for the rosary. Its real name is Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary, an entirely different thing. Our Lady of the Rosary is St. Mary, the mother of Jesus. The church was named for her not the rosary. Catholics sometimes call her that because she supposedly taught the rosary for the first time to St. Dominic during the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century.