AUBURN — The word for the school year is amnesia, as in don’t get amnesia when it comes to what you’ve learned about God, the leader of the Maine Catholic church told Catholic students Wednesday.

Bishop Richard Malone came to the junior-senior high school to celebrate the beginning of the school year in a newly organized St. Dominic Academy for prekindergarten to grade 12.

During his Mass sermon, the charismatic Malone walked down the aisle to get closer to students. Despite the heat, he wore an almost constant smile. The gym was warm and was not air conditioned. Younger students wore uniforms; the girls plaid jumpers or skirts, boys of all ages wore shirts and ties.

“Who knows what amnesia is?” Malone asked.

Amnesia is about forgetting, one student offered.

Correct, Malone said. “I want to tell you a story.” When he was 26 his first assignment was to a large, Massachusetts parish with four other priests. One priest was always on call for emergencies.

One night at 2 in the morning, Malone was called to the hospital. A young couple was in a terrible accident. When Malone got to the hospital, he found the woman shaken up, but OK.

Her husband was badly hurt. No one was sure if he would survive. Malone pardoned the unconscious man of his sins.

Three or four days later, Malone was visiting hospital patients when he saw the woman, her face buried in her hands, crying. The woman said her husband was “getting better by the hour,” but had lost his memory.

“’It’s the amnesia that’s getting to me father. He’s forgotten so many of the most important things,’” Malone recalled her saying.

Turning to students, the bishop asked them to imagine how awful that would be. The man’s memories of their life together, dating, falling in love, getting engaged, their wedding day, gone.

The man eventually got his memory back.

“The reason I share this with you is because schools teach us a lot of stuff we’re supposed to remember … but the truly most important things,” about God, how God has a plan for each of them, how Jesus Christ died to save them, is not taught in most schools. “St. Dom’s reminds you over and over not to forget them. You don’t want to get amnesia” about God.

After praying for the miners in Chile, victims of the Pakistan floods and Haiti earthquake, Malone and five priests offered communion. As the ceremony ended boys were told they could remove their ties, an announcement met with applause.

Malone came to the same gym last February to announce falling enrollment meant the three Lewiston-Auburn Catholic schools would be consolidated to two, one prekindergarten to grade 6 school in Lewiston and the junior-senior high school in Auburn.

Making those changes was difficult, Malone said Wednesday. “I’m always concerned we keep enrollment up to a level that’s strong,” he said. “I’m thrilled to get to this point. We have a much stronger Catholic education in Lewiston-Auburn, one academy instead of units all over the place.”

He hopes moving junior high students to the high school will strengthen enrollment when parents like what they see at the spacious, attractive high school. “The challenge is the tuition,” Malone said of the $8,300 annual cost for grades 9-12; $2,800 for younger grades.

Some of the diocese’s recent capital campaign will go toward tuition assistance, he said, adding it’s still spread thin. “We’re going to do everything we can to keep this school strong and growing.”

Total enrollment is 599 at the academy, or what used to be St. Dominic Regional High School and Trinity Catholic School. That makes St. Dom’s the largest Catholic school in Maine, but it is also the only prekindergarten to grade 12 Catholic school in Maine, said Catholic School Superintendent Rosemary Donohue.

Parents Michael and Cathy Murphy of Winthrop, whose daughter is a senior, attended the Mass. Changes at the school “means there’s a lot on (principal Donald) Fournier’s plate,” he said. “So far everything we see is just wonderful.”