AUBURN — A decade after high-schoolers heard their first Catholic lesson in Auburn, local Catholics marked the anniversary with food, prayer and thanks.

St. Dominic Academy persists and thrives.

“I think people will always sacrifice for this school,” said Bob Gilbert, a Lewiston parishioner and alumnus who joined more than 100 people to celebrate the date the school opened its Auburn campus. The $13 million building opened on Jan. 6, 2002.

“This is where the young blood comes from,” Gilbert said. And this is where they will learn the school’s own spirit of sacrifice. “At St. Dom’s you learn that others come first.”

It’s part of an ethic that was repeated again and again Friday as people watched a slide show of the building’s construction and talked about what the school means. They ate dinner. And they celebrated Mass, led by Bishop Richard Malone.

“Our Catholic schools, and St. Dominic Academy in particular, shine as a bright light, radiant with the conviction that God is truth,” Malone said during his service. In the gym, he led about 75 people in the ritual of communion. He later joined a banquet in the auditorium and listened as children sang.

At another table, Gilbert, 75, watched and smiled.

“This is awesome,” he said.

Friday’s anniversary did not celebrate the creation of an institution.

After all, St. Dominic’s opened in 1941 in downtown Lewiston. Its grand brick building taught generations of young people a curriculum that included rigorous academics and study of the Bible. Its teams, the Saints, battled Lewiston’s Blue Devils.

By the 1990s, the Lewiston building was worn out. Led by Bishop Joseph Gerry, local Catholics raised the money to build the school on donated property near Lake Auburn. Construction began in 2000.

Gerry had planned to attend Friday’s celebration but felt poorly, Malone said.

“I’m going to find a way to get him here during this anniversary year,” promised the bishop.

Malone also lamented the fact that Michael Welch, who had been the last principal at the old campus and the first one here, could not be present. He died in 2006.

The bishop imagined that Welch was part of the anniversary celebration in heaven.

“He’s probably sitting next to Saint Dominic himself,” Malone said.

Donald Fournier, the school’s current principal, said he believes part of the need for Friday’s celebration came from the school’s stature as a community institution. People talk about the school and the experiences they had in the same way that other people often describe college, he said.

It will continue, he said.

Malone talked of the school’s motto, embedded in the cement at the entrance.

“Veritas vitae,” Malone said. “God’s truth. People find it here.”
dhartill@sunjournal.com