From the President Dear friends of Christendom, As we now approach the end of the year and the celebration of the birth of our Divine Savior, it seems to be a good time to reflect together on the timeliness of Christendom’s educational apostolate. Christendom was founded in 1977 through the vision of Dr. Warren Carroll, who, with other committed Catholic laymen, was deeply concerned about many trends in contemporary Catholic education. Heeding the call of the Second Vatican Council, which sought the active involvement of the laity to renew the temporal order, the College was established and took for its motto Instaurare Omnia in Christo –To restore all things in Christ. Our goal and purpose as a Catholic academic institution is to help our students consecrate their intellects and wills to Christ and to form them in such a way that they will be prepared intellectually and spiritually for the complex problems facing our society. As you know, we are a liberal arts college. As a result, we seek to educate man in wisdom for life, not merely train man the worker. Our education focuses primarily upon the development of mental faculties in order to teach our students to think clearly, to write clearly, and to speak with conviction and passion about the permanent things. But this is not enough! We also seek to form the moral character and to foster the spiritual character, recognizing, as one of our founding faculty members wrote, that “the mind cannot achieve its end if it ends up in Hell.” Therefore, we are concerned with the souls of our students. The integration of the intellect into the life of the whole man must involve attention not only to the exercise of natural skills but also to the participation in the order of grace. We are Catholic! We believe and affirm the truth of Catholicism. Our students experience a vigorous program of academically challenging studies in an authentically Catholic atmosphere, which allows them to “breathe Catholic air,” as we like to say, and helps them grow intellectually and spiritually. The program is carefully designed to prepare our students for tasks that confront the educated Christian man and woman: leading, making decisions, and ordering their lives in society to have an impact on history. To this end, we seek to immerse our students in the great ideas and works of our Western Christian tradition, urging them to become one with the tradition and to make their own unique contribution to it. This tradition is, after all, part of their patrimony and they have a right to this as Catholics. It is important for them to realize that orthodoxy is not something that is humdrum and safe–it is dynamic, living, and vibrant. They need to participate in what Chesterton called “the romance of orthodoxy.” While we do not simply train our students in particular careers, we do provide an excellent preparation for careers by educating them in wisdom–both supernatural and natural. The chief exponent of this wisdom, as the Church tells us, is St. Thomas Aquinas. It is our
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Timothy T. O’Donnell, STD, KGCHS
firm belief that once our graduates have been deeply educated in this Catholic intellectual tradition, they will be able to pursue any career they desire, whether it be as businessmen, engineers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc. Whatever their profession or vocation, they will live it fully in the world as articulate, believing, committed Roman Catholics. We have a core curriculum that guides the student well into his third year. For us, “Catholic” will never be just a label. It is a truly vigorous academic formation properly sequenced with majors in Theology, Philosophy, History, English Literature, Political Science, and Classical and Early Christian Studies. We also have core courses in Math, Science, Physics, and Astronomy. The spiritual, cultural, and educational culmination of Christendom’s core is the Junior Semester in Rome. The purpose of our Rome Program is to enhance our academic program with the cultural and intellectual enrichment that is offered to students when they are living and studying in Rome–at the Heart of the Church. The Rome curriculum includes courses specifically designed to take advantage of the historical and cultural riches of Roma aeterna. In addition to taking full advantage of the artistic, cultural, ecclesiastical, and spiritual riches and resources of the Eternal City, the program also includes visits to Florence, Assisi, and Siena. Many students have remarked that the Rome Program allowed them to “go home” to the center of their Roman Catholic history and heritage. As one student recalled, “It was an opportunity to better know and love the Church and the Pope, in a place that has been the center of Christian faith for 2,000 years….it was an excellent way to broaden our horizons and become a better person and a better Roman Catholic. It changed my life.” None of this would be possible if not for you! We are educating leaders for the twenty-first century who are grounded in Truth–both natural and supernatural. Our graduates will be able to attack the problems that afflict our Church and world at their roots, not simply to apply bandages to open wounds. The problems we are facing are fundamentally philosophical and theological in their roots and stem from a denial of truth and the objective moral order. With your help, we can lay the foundation that can turn the tide and help our suffering Church and nation. In many ways, we see that our great nation is at a crossroads. It is time once again to restate the obvious. Things have been reduced now to a great simplicity and clarity for those who have eyes to see, for those who have ears to hear, for those who have a heart open to the Truth. We are faced with a very simple choice: do we follow the way of life, the way enshrined by the sacred Judeo-Christian tradition built on the foundation of natural law? Do we follow the way shown by the late Pope John Paul II in his magnificent encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church? Following Pope Benedict XVI, do we submit our necks to the yoke of “the dictatorship of relativism,” or do we maintain that certain things are objectively evil and other things are objectively good? Or, do we follow the way of Baal and the culture of death? We are in this for the long battle and we need a long-term strategy. see From the President page 8