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CATHOLIC EDUCATION IN
ST. FRANCIS DE SALES PARISH
Catholic Education in Houma has a very
interesting historical record. On August 3, 1858, six Terrebonne citizens recorded
officially their intention to establish a school to be called the Houma Academy.
They built the beautiful Houma Academy that stood for many years on Point Street. It
was a daring spirit of enterprise on the part of these six men who incorporated their
intention in a legal document to establish private education in Houma.
Their good will, however, could not assure the success of the
Academy. The well-proportioned building with twelve rooms, cupola on the top, and
balustrade in the front was a fitting monument to their intent. Perhaps this
building was too large for the needs of the time and place. Moreover, during the
Civil War years the Academy mortgages exceeded $3,500.00.
This Houma Academy was taken over as the foundation for a new
school of the Marianite Sisters of Holy Cross in 1870. This is, in fact, the
foundation of Catholic Education in the Houma-Terrebonne area.
For the first twenty years, the Sisters taught only girls; in
1890, a boys' school was opened and also staffed by the Marianites. The setting of
the boy's school for decades was a frame, porched, two-story building on the site of the
present parish youth center and rectory. It served its purpose as an
elementary school building until the new St. Francis de Sales School was planned by Msgr.
Lucien J. Caillouet, started by Bishop Maurice Schexnayder, and finished in the early
years of Msgr. Joseph Wester at a cost of some $650,000 during the 1951-52 school year.
The efforts of the Marianites in Houma were reinforced in 1952 by
the arrival of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. The old academy on Point Street
became a boys' high school and remained so until the completion of Vandebilt
Catholic High School for both boys and girls in the fall of 1965.
Within the territory once solitarily traversed by Father Menard,
there are now laboring nearly 100 priests in some 25 parish churches, with some 85 or so
religious men and women aided by 200 lay persons in educational work alone.
This is the noble history of Catholic Education from its
beginning in the Houma-Terrebonne area.
