"Yesterday will not return again. After yesterday, today;
after today, tomorrow.
All times and all things temporal pass away."
St. Augustine
On the Good of Widowhood, 25
The building initiatives of the 1870s continued into the next decade
when Villanova commissioned a colorful Victorian Gothic church in 1883, used ever since as
a college and parish church. In 1893 Villanova celebrated its Fiftieth Anniversary,
or Golden Jubilee. Its highlights were a Solemn Pontifical Mass and the publication
of Reverend Thomas C. Middleton's Historical Sketch. Villanova remained a
very small college, however, with only 90 students at the time of the Golden Jubilee, 15
of whom were seminarians.
