Rita Piro, the chairperson of the foreign language department at The Mary Louis Academy, Jamaica Estates, can still recall the one and only time she received detention while she was a student at the prestigious all-girls school in Queens. It came from her science teacher Sister Kathleen McKinney, CSJ, who happens to be Piro’s boss these days as the principal of Mary Louis.

“It was during my senior year,” recalls Piro. “It was a two-hour detention, one for being disruptive during a school assembly and the other for being really smart-alecky to her – but we haven’t let it come between us.”

Piro was recounting the story the other afternoon as we prepared to tape a segment of Tablet Week in Review about her most recent book. A prolific author who has written about showtime celebrities, she recently penned “Beneath the Blue and Gold: The Story of The Mary Louis Academy.”

The book takes its title from the school’s colors. In 303 pages, it traces the 70-year story of the school from its inception in the mind of Mother Mary Louis, the Superior General of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the early 20th century, to the successful operation it enjoys today in the beginning of the 21st century.

“Mother Mary Louis herself had chosen the hilltop location for her congregation’s college prep school for girls located at Edgerton Blvd. and Wexford Terrace,” pointed out Piro.

“However, when the Sisters of St. Joseph inquired as to its purchase, they discovered that the Passionists of Immaculate Conception Monastery and Church had already bought the land and wanted to build a boys prep seminary for their congregation on the site.”

The story continues with Mother Mary Louis interceding with Bishop Thomas E. Molloy, who intervened with the Passionists, who eventually saw the wisdom in selling the land to the Sisters at the same price for which they had purchased it.

Thus begins the marvelous story about the Sisters of St. Joseph who built one of the more successful secondary schools in the diocese. The Mary Louis Academy at one time was one of 52 Catholic high schools in the Diocese of Brooklyn and all operated at full capacity. As enrollments dipped and expenses increased, most of those schools fell by the wayside. But The Mary Louis Academy has continued because of its outstanding tradition of academic and social excellence.

Familiar Names and Societies

As you read the pages of this book, you’ll come across familiar names like Bishop Charles McDonnell, Bishop John J. Boardman, Mother Mary Austin, CSJ, Mother DeChantal Keating, Father Owen Doyle, CP, et al.

Alumnae will recall the annual school-wide events like Mission Sunday, CYO Youth Rally, Vocation Week, Diocesan Youth Symposium, as well as the list of extra-curricular activities like The Tablet Club, the Mission Society, the Diocesan Combined Orchestra, and the Diocesan Leo Honor Society.

Piro spent the better part of 14 months, working two to three and sometimes eight hours a day researching, writing and designing the book, which is published by Baker and Taylor, the largest wholesale distributor of books to stores and libraries. It is believed to be the only history of a Catholic girls’ high school ever published professionally and available commercially in bookstores nationwide and on the Internet.

She culled the pages of The Tablet, The New York Journal-American, The Long Island Press, Herald Tribune and the New York Daily News as she gathered all the information she could about her alma mater. Also valuable facts came from the school newspaper Mariel, the yearbook Crusader, the archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Brentwood, as well as New York City and other public records.

For Piro, this was a labor of love. She receives no compensation for the project. All profits go directly to The Mary Louis Development Fund. Although the book can be ordered online or at Barnes and Noble, the school receives its greatest profit from direct orders placed at the school (718-297-2120).

Piro has a dream of someday writing the definitive story of the diocesan Catholic Schools system.

“Nobody did Catholic education better than the elementary and high schools in the Diocese of Brooklyn,” boasts Piro.