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Third Sunday of Easter
26 April 2009
Dear Friends in Christ,
From the earliest days of Christianity, the Church has established and promoted schools of every level and type in order to teach the Gospel and to promote human flourishing through the formation of minds and hearts, and the health of the Church in any given time and place is usually related directly to the health of her schools. Here in the United States, Catholics have constructed in less than 200 years a truly extraordinary network of Catholic education from kindergarten through graduate school through hard work and sacrificial love.
Sadly, not every institution that begins as a Catholic school will end as a Catholic school, and this is particularly true of our Catholic colleges and universities which are all too prone to the same forces of secularization that caused schools like Princeton, Harvard, and Yale to sever all ties to the Christian communities which founded them. We can see the corrosive forces of secularization going on right now at once proudly Catholic schools like Georgetown, Boston College, and Notre Dame – the latter being even now engulfed by a fierce controversy over granting an honorary degree to a pro-abortion politician and facing a growing chorus of condemnation from bishops all over the country. But this drift away from the Catholic identity of our colleges and universities is being fought valiantly by many excellent institutions of higher learning, two of which are close to us in a variety of ways.
Belmont Abbey College is located on the campus of Belmont Abbey, a Benedictine monastery just outside of Charlotte and about an hour’s drive from us. The founding pastor of St. Mary’s and the architect of our present church were both monks of Belmont, and the College has emerged in the last few years as a truly outstanding example of authentically Catholic education in a small liberal arts college. Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee is another splendid Catholic college, and it is run by the same Dominican Sisters who staff our school. With degree programs in the liberal arts, nursing, teacher education, and business, Aquinas College is a shining example of how the life of the mind can flourish in a community of scholars dedicated to the truth of the Gospel and fidelity to the Church.
You can learn more about these schools at www.bac.edu and www.aquinascollege.edu, and a much larger list of authentically Catholic colleges and universities is maintained by the Cardinal Newman Society. Visit their website at www.cardinalnewmansociety.org, and have a look at “The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College.” This an excellent resource to help you verify that every school which calls itself Catholic is in fact Catholic.
Father Newman