Mary's Birthday Celebration

Sunday, September 8, 2019

Last year, the campus was surrounded by students, faculty, staff and friends of the college as we offered a “Prayer from the Heart” for Mary's birthday. This year, we will light the Fr. Henry Lemke Lantern for the first time. The Lantern, which will hang in the window of Café 62 inside the Ferrell Academic Center, will symbolize the Marian miracle that saved Fr. Lemke during a storm on the plains of the American frontier in 1856.

Fr. Lemke writes in his memoire about being lost in a horrific storm and, after praying to Mary for salvation, saw a light glimmering in the distance. That light turned out to be a lantern in the window of a small cabin. When he arrived, he learned that a little girl had seen a vision of "a Lady in white" and her mother had placed the lantern in the window when the girl cried out.

Fr. Lemke attributed it to the work of the Virgin Mary and said it was a miracle. He would go on to call for additional monks to come to the area to found a college, which would become Benedictine College. The short film, Lemke: A Founders Miracle, chronicles this event.

Be on campus to witness the first lighting of the Fr. Henry Lemke Lantern on Sunday, Sept. 8, at 5:30 p.m. in the Academic Quad on the Atchison campus. Dinner, with birthday cake for dessert, will follow in the Dining Hall and the pathway beside it.

The Lantern will burn eternally, always showing the way like the lantern in the window did for Fr. Lemke.