A warm and sticky Friday felt more like late summer than the first day of school, as more than 1,000 students at Cardinal Spellman High School filed into its non-air-conditioned gymnasium, to welcome a new school year, a new freshman class, and a special guest — Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

White leaflets fluttered as makeshift fans as Cardinal Dolan kicked off the new term with Mass and words of wisdom for the assembled students at the Bronx school. “There is a plan to God’s design for the world. A plan that God has for us and the world. God has a plan, see? And at the center of God’s plan stand four people. Two of them flunked. Two of them passed with honors,” he said. 

The Cardinal spoke first about the original sin of Adam and Eve, and then of the Virgin Mary, whose birthday was celebrated the same day as the school visit, and her son Jesus Christ.

“Never ever forget God has a plan for you. A focus. He loves you personally and passionately. He wants you with Him for all eternity in happiness. Nothing can set God’s plan and purpose aside. Except our own stubbornness and disobedience,” Cardinal Dolan said.

Father Peter Pilsner, Cardinal Spellman’s spiritual director, and Father Joseph Michael concelebrated the Mass with Cardinal Dolan.

All of Cardinal Spellman’s students came forward to receive a communion or blessing from Cardinal Dolan and the attending eucharistic ministers, leading to quite a bit of noise as they made their way first down the bleacher steps, and then back up to their seats, not to mention a couple of missteps and close calls.

After Mass, the school’s new student body officers took their oaths.

The newly created Cardinal Spellman High School opened in September, 1959, in temporary quarters, formerly Thomas Alva Edison’s Biograph Motion Picture Studios: the site of the original of the motion picture industry in America) on Marmion Avenue in the Bronx. Its permanent location on Baychester Avenue, between Boston Post Road and East 233rd Street, covers 13 acres (including athletic fields, grandstands, running track, and parking lots).

Francis Cardinal Spellman personally dedicated the new school facilities on May 27, 1962. Many years later, the name of Needham Avenue, in front of the school, was officially changed by Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer ’68 to Cardinal Spellman Place.