The Centre for Arts, Media, and Technology at St. Patrick Catholic Secondary School (also referred to as SPCSS, St. Pats, St. Patrick, St. Patrick C.S.S. or Pats) is a Roman Catholic high school located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada as part of the Toronto Catholic District School Board. It is dedicated to Saint Patrick of Ireland and St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, the founder of the Congregation of Notre Dame. One of Toronto's oldest schools, St. Patrick's used to be an elementary school founded in 1852 until 1983 and turned into a secondary school which opened in 1986 on D'Arcy Street (now the Toronto District School Board's Heydon Park Secondary School). Since September 1989, St. Patrick had been moved from downtown Toronto into the former Lakeview Secondary School (also owned by the TDSB) in Toronto's east end. The motto for St. Patrick is "Amor Christi nos impellit" which translates to English as "The Love of Christ Impels Us".
History
Patron saint
Saint Patrick was a Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland. Known as the "Apostle of Ireland", he is the primary patron saint of the island along with Saints Brigid and Columba.
Two authentic letters from him survive, from which come the only generally accepted details of his life. When he was about 16, he was captured from his home and taken as a slave to Ireland, where he lived for six years before escaping and returning to his family. After becoming a cleric, he returned to northern and western Ireland as an ordained bishop, but little is known about the places where he worked. By the seventh century, he had already come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland.
Saint Patrick's Day is observed on March 17, the date of his death. It is celebrated both inside and outside Ireland, as both a religious and, especially outside Ireland, secular holiday. In the dioceses of Ireland, it is both a solemnity and a holy day of obligation; outside Ireland, it can be a celebration of Ireland itself. For most of Christianity's first thousand years, canonizations were done on the diocesan or regional level. Relatively soon after the death of people considered very holy, the local Church affirmed that they could be liturgically celebrated as saints. As a result, St. Patrick has never been formally canonised by a Pope; nevertheless, various Christian churches declare that he is a Saint in Heaven (he is in the List of Saints). He is still widely venerated in Ireland and elsewhere today.
The school today
One of Toronto's oldest Catholic schools, St. Patrick was founded as an elementary school on St. Patrick Market St. in downtown Toronto in 1852 during the introduction of publicly funded education in Canada. At first a primarily Irish school, St. Patrick (patron of Ireland) and St. Marguerite Bourgeoys (a French Canadian) were chosen as the patrons. The school location changed places to Dummer St. to Caerhowel St. to 174 Beverly a 3-story school dubbed during a period as an open air school due to the large balcony facing Beverly which was used to for exposure to the sun for the health of specific students. In 1967 a new school building was started to the south of the old building at 70 D'Arcy St. completed by the September 1968 school season, replacing a former Jewish Orthodox school that was torn down. The old building was used by a private catholic school as a temporary building while waiting for theirs to be built. The elementary school closed in 1983 and was re-opened as a secondary school in 1986 under the leadership of the first principal Sr. Lucille Corrigan, a former principal at Notre Dame High School.
With the extension of public funding of Catholic education to secondary schools, St. Patrick became a secondary school and the Metropolitan Separate School Board (now the Toronto Catholic District School Board) began to search for a new site. The school opened as a result of students cannot be accommodated at Brother Edmund Rice, De La Salle, St. Mary's and St. Joseph College due to lack of space for portable classrooms. Initially, it served the population bordered between south central Toronto, an area south of Dupont Street, west of the Don Valley Parkway and east of Ossington Avenue.
In 1989, during a period of reorganization by the Toronto Board of Education, Lakeview Secondary School, in a new building on the site of a former quarry at 49 Felstead Avenue in Toronto's east end, was closed due to low enrolment and the property was turned over to the MSSB (Metropolitan Separate School Board, now known as TCDSB) to be the new site for St. Patrick. The school has a large feeder area, serving Catholics from almost all of the former City of Toronto's east end.