Marian High School: the diocesan school across from the motherhouse

1964–present · 1311 South Logan Street

The school's own founding record: Marian's founding — Bishop Leo A. Pursley's project for a second Catholic high school in the South Bend area, the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration's gift of more than thirty-six acres across Dragoon Trail from their motherhouse, and the sisters' staffing of the school — stands in the Religion section, which owns the congregation; this entry owns the school's own course, and prints its dates from the school's own published history. That history records that classes began on Tuesday, 8 September 1964, at 8:40 in the morning — "the beginning of Catholic secondary education in Mishawaka" — after two years of planning and construction under the Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend, delayed by bad weather to that fall. The diocesan anniversary account published in Today's Catholic in September 2014 gives the opening as 4 September and the first class as 230; the school's own history gives 8 September and a first class of 239 — 131 boys and 108 girls, taught by twelve faculty. Both statements stand, each with its keeper; the conflict is carried whole in the Religion section as well. The campus is seventy-two acres; the school's patroness, treated in the Religion section, is Our Lady of Lourdes. The building committee named in the school's 1968 yearbook, the Madrigal — Bishop Pursley; Monsignors Lester, Bonk and Hoffman; the Rev. Vichuras; and Christianson, Lenhard and Miholich, with Edwin D. Van Ryn as architect — is the school's own record of who built it.

The first administration and the separated school: The 1968 Madrigal names the founding administration: the principal was the Very Rev. Donald R. Verhagen, S.D.S.; the vice-principal, Fr. Philip Tursini, S.D.S.; the dean of girls and guidance head, Sister M. Clare, O.S.F.; and the girls' disciplinarian, Sister Angela. Bishop John M. Rhoades, at the school's fiftieth anniversary in 2014, described the origin plainly: at the beginning Marian "was almost completely staffed by Salvatorian priests and brothers, and religious sisters." Classes were separated by gender at the founding — boys and girls in different classrooms — an arrangement of the era that later changed. The school's second documented principal era belongs to Cyril Devliegher, 1972–82, which the diocesan account calls "a period of uncertainty and transition" after the Second Vatican Council. Principal Loesch — who sat for the school on the diocese's Catholic-schools consolidation committee in 2010 — held the office across a long tenure in the older sources; Mark Kirzeder was "current principal" in the diocesan account of September 2014; and Mark Freund stands as principal in the school's 2023–24 record.

The school today: Marian draws its students, on its own history's telling, from Mishawaka, South Bend, Granger, Goshen, Elkhart and Plymouth, and counts more than 9,000 students served across its sixty years. Its own current pages claim an enrollment of over 800 with a faculty and staff of over 100; the state count for 2023–24 is 735 — both stand, dated, the school's claim and the state's figure. The school's reference profile carries North Central Association accreditation from 1996 and a place in the Catholic High School Honor Roll's top fifty in 2005. It stands in November 2026 as the web's one diocesan high school on Mishawaka soil — the public high school's counterpart across the city's south side, still facing the motherhouse whose sisters' land and labor raised it.

Sources:

1. Marian High School, the school's own history page (marianhs.org), and current institutional pages, November 2026.
2. Today's Catholic, fiftieth-anniversary account of Marian High School, September 2014, including Bishop Rhoades's anniversary statements.
3. The Madrigal, Marian High School yearbook, 1968 edition (building committee; first administration), via the Internet Archive.
4. Indiana Department of Education / NCES enrollment figure for Marian High School, 2023–24.