Ateneo de Manila Grade School Mass of the Holy Spirit

Every start of a new academic year, Catholic schools celebrate a Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit as a way of invoking the Spirit of God upon students and teachers. Catholic institutions of education, particularly Jesuit institutions, have been celebrating Masses of the Holy Spirit since the Middle Ages. In 1548, when families in Messina in southern Italy wanted to start a school for their children, Saint Ignatius of Loyola sent ten Jesuit priests to start what would become the first Jesuit school. At that first school, now the University of Messina, the first Mass of the Holy Spirit was celebrated. By the time Saint Ignatius died in 1556, there were thirty-five Jesuit schools in total, each celebrating a Mass of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of classes.

The Ateneo Grade School community will celebrate the Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit for the beginning of the new school year. During this celebration, the students and teachers will be blessed and the teachers will receive their commissioning for the year.

This will be on Friday, 26 August 2022, at 8:00 am at the AGS Covered Courts.

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, our Grade 6 students will be on-site for the Mass.

The Mass of the Holy Spirit will be live streamed through Zoom and through the AGS-CMO YouTube channel https://youtu.be/3f4g-7gtaAA.