A message from Salesian Life and Campus Ministry:

“This is the place of our delight and rest.” –Saint Jane de Chantal

Each year, our Mendota Heights Visitation community chooses a Salesian virtue to focus on and practice during the school year. The 2026-27 virtue of the year is Hospitality. A quote from one of our founders is also chosen to accompany the virtue. This year, Saint Jane de Chantal’s beautiful words will help us focus on and grow in our understanding of Hospitality. When Jane stepped over the threshold of the first monastery in Annecy, France, establishing the Visitation Order in 1610, she exclaimed to her founding sisters, "This is the place of our delight and rest." Jane and the founding Visitation sisters are a true source of Salesian hospitality.

Our quote of the year was beautifully painted on a banner that now hangs in the Visitation stairwell. It is a reminder each day to bring forward our hospitable hearts and find delight and rest in meeting the needs of those around us, and those beyond our Visitation community. Thank you to student artist Maggie Dumond '27.

Thank you to Honora Mundy '27, as well. Her Hospitality artwork adorns the cover of this year's Middle and Upper school student planner.

A group of representatives from Georgetown, Saint Louis and Mendota Heights Visitation schools, known as the national Visitation Salesian Network (VSN), also chooses a theme for the school year that the three schools embrace together. This year’s theme is “Hearts United in Peace." Our world is marked by conflict, unrest, and hearts that remain anxious. In the Salesian tradition, our founders speak with clarity and hope and invite us to respond with presence, relationship, and a commitment to peace. Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Jane de Chantal, who lived at a time of religious and political turmoil as well as faced their own personal challenges, showed us that peace is found in gentle strength, dialogue and a confidence in an ever present God. Peace begins within and flows outward in the way we encounter others. 

As we begin this new school year, may our hearts be united in God’s peace, allowing us to share true hospitality with our classmates, teachers, families, friends, the Visitation community, and communities beyond.

Saint Francis de Sales, pray for us.
Saint Jane de Chantal, pray for us.
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us

Live + Jesus!