Villa Spiritus
Location:
The Gilbertine Institute 541005 Rge Rd 72, Derwent AB, T0B 1C0
In-Person Schedule: Wednesday 8 30 am to 4 30 pm
Remote Learning Schedule: Monday 9.30 am to 12.30 pm
Welcome to Villa Spiritus.
We’re a Catholic liberal arts programme in the English schooling tradition where your children will grow in mind, heart, & soul.
Therefore with full right the Church promotes letters, science, art in so far as necessary or helpful to Christian education, in addition to her work for the salvation of souls: founding and maintaining schools and institutions adapted to every branch of learning and degree of culture.[13] Nor may even physical culture, as it is called, be considered outside the range of her maternal supervision, for the reason that it also is a means which may help or harm Christian education. And this work of the Church in every branch of culture is of immense benefit to families and nations which without Christ are lost…
Divini Illius Magistri 21-22
Programme Overview:
Villa Spiritus is an integrated educational programme that honours the theological order of the domestic Church, affirming parents as the primary educators of their children. The Villa Spiritus programme is informed by the knowledge that children are persons with dignity and a supernatural destiny.
Villa Spiritus has an intentional monastic ordering. The rhythm of the day revolves around the chanting of the daily offices, the Little Hours, and attendance at Mass. The influence of monastic spirituality, industriousness and orderliness permeate Villa Spiritus in tangible ways.
The wholesome environment of Villa Spiritus allows each child to mature academically and in virtue with gentle and charitable guidance. Studies are meant to emphasise and nurture the intellectual, historical, artistic, and spiritual gifts of the faith. The ultimate goal is for students to discover the influence and beauty of Catholicism in every aspect of culture and their own
lives, growing in holiness and drawing ever closer to the Triune God.
Villa Spiritus supports the option of being either a fulltime student or a part time student. All students are taught Religion, Math, Science, Choral Music, Art, and other curricular options.
For part time students: Parents home educate English, Social Studies and subjects desired in addition to the above. Villa Spiritus fully supports traditional home education high school completion options, including a parent-verified transcript and diploma, and also supports course challenges that may be applied towards an Alberta High School Diploma.
For full time students: Villa Spiritus partners with online schools that offer English and Social Studies. Other courses required for the Alberta Diploma are offered at Villa Spiritus for these students so that they may achieve the Alberta High School Diploma.
Our Apostol ate
Villa Spiritus is an accredited independent school serving Grades 9 through 12 administered by the Gilbertine Institute school authority, which includes WISDOM Home Schooling, The Holy House of Our Lady & St. Benedict, The Gilbertine Academy, and Villa Spiritus.
Our school is under the authority of the Very Reverend Robert-Charles Bengry GSmp, Magister of the Companions of St. Gilbert, and the Reverend Kenneth Noster, Head of School of the Gilbertine Institute.
Holy House & the Gilbertines
TheGilbertine Institute’s Grade 1-8 programmes take their name from the Holy House of Walsingham, as a replica of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s house built in the eleventh century on the pattern of a vision given to Richeldis de Faverches, a devout noblewoman and widow known as the Lady of the Manor of Little Walsingham. The site housed one of the most important devotional objects in medieval England, the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, as well as several chapels and the necessary accommodations and hospices for pilgrims who came to the site. For hundreds of years, the Holy House served as one of medieval England’s most important pilgrimage sites, serving as a model of the way the sacred and domestic can come together to nurture body and soul in a single physical space. This legacy of sanctified community and ordered devotion provides a natural inspiration for a Catholic school, where learning, moral formation, and communal care are intertwined, and students grow as scholars, virtuous members of Church and society, and future inhabitants of the Father’s mansions with many rooms.
The daily rhythm of Gilbertine Institute schools is informed by the spirituality of another tradition which combines the secular and domestic, the Companions of St. Gilbert of Sempringham (GSmp), for which Gilbertine Academy is named. The companions serve as a modern revival of the Order of Sempringham, which was founded by St. Gilbert of Sempringham in 1131 to address the spiritual and social needs of his time. The only religious order native to England, the Gilbertines were also the Church’s only “double order,” in which men and women, both religious and lay, lived out their various vocations under the auspices of a shared rule, prayer life, and work. Drawing on the Augustinian and Benedictine traditions and influenced by Cistercian practice, Gilbertine spirituality emphasized ordered charity, intellectual formation, obedience, and mutual responsibility, particularly in service to education and the pastoral care of souls. This pattern of life and purpose provides solid groundwork for a Catholic liberal arts school in the English tradition, where the mind, heart, and soul are formed in a community ordered toward the knowledge, love, and service of the goods in this life in anticipation of their fulfillment in the next.
Agroup of Catholic parents engaged in a home schooling co-op approached The Gilbertine Institute with a request that it provide high school math and science courses for their eldest children. Those involved began to invoke the Holy Spirit for direction and providence, and, when every detail of this school came together beyond our expectations, all agreed it should be named the House of the Holy Spirit, Villa Spiritus.
In light of the apostolate of the Gilbertine Institute, our school cultivates a vibrant lay life embedded in a monastic rhythm. Our schools operate under the guidance of our Magister and chaplain, begin and end with prayer from the Divine Worship Daily Office, and culminate in daily Mass. The life of the Church spills out of the Divine Office, informing our classwork as our teachers and all staff encourage students to embrace a
sacramental world-view ordered towards union with the Triune God. Through our academic studies, we learn about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and we join ourselves to the Blessed Sacrament.
Another feature is the practical integration of the home, school, and Church. Restoring the domestic church and Catholic academic tradition means an investment
“The whole fruit of their [educational] endeavors should consist in the testimony of God and a good conscience.
Thus they will be inwardly calm and at peace and neither stirred by praise of flatterers nor stung by
the follies of unlearned mockers of learning.”
in an authentic common life. The goal is for students to discover the influence and beauty of Catholicism in every aspect of culture and in their own lives, growing in holiness, and drawing ever closer to God.
These features of our schools in Edmonton, Calgary and Derwent provide a wholly unique and rare educational opportunity.
St. Thomas More Letter to William Gonell
Grades
9 - 12:
Fitting for this World, Training for Another
Atthe high school level, Villa Spiritus continues to provide a classical Catholic education that regards parents as the primary educators, but seeks to equip students to take a more active and independent role in their education, working toward completing requirements of an Alberta High School diploma. Our programme provides an integrated classical Catholic education, supporting parents as the primary educators. Both home at school and schooling at home take on new dimensions as students become more responsible for preparing for in-person days, participating in learning
and discussion in the classroom, and bringing both of these activities to fruition via further assessment and enrichment.
Although our high school programme retains a vision of the domestic church as the first society, it also recognizes that students must be prepared to participate responsibly in the larger societies of Church, nation, and world. We seek to aid parents in preparing their students in evaluating, understanding, and joining social discourse in its many forms.
Faith Formation
Our course of studies equips students to grow and thrive in a world that is often hostile to our Catholic faith. We assist their spiritual, human, and academic formation. Because education is more than the transfer of knowledge and skills, we work with parents to help form the whole person as a beloved child of God with a supernatural destiny, in the pursuit of truth, beauty and holiness. The environment of Villa Spiritus aims to allow each child to mature academically, spiritually, socially and emotionally, as strong, resilient and engaged Catholics equipped for sainthood.
Character Formation
“If faith is like the root, charity is like the sap that nourishes the trunk and rises into the branches, the network of virtues, to produce the delicious fruit of good works" (Servais Pinckaers, 0.P., Morali9: The Catholic View, South Bend, St. Augustine Press, 2001).
Villa Spiritus’ cultivation of faith naturally leads to a cultivation of virtue. Students in our programmes receive instruction in the classical understanding of the virtues as dispositions which arise out of habits built over time by means of repeated choiceworthy actions. This understanding is animated anew by the wisdom of the Church, as demonstrated in Scripture, the documents of the Magisterium, and the lives of the saints, which recognize the integral role grace plays in the development of good character.
Students consider the way virtue is cultivated in everyday life through examples found in literature, Scripture, poetry, and history both sacred and secular, as well as, in the higher divisions, the way it has been understood and applied through the disciplines of philosophy and theology. Students are also shown how to live virtuous lives in the school setting, as faculty and staff strive to demonstrate these habits, aid students in
identifying them in their classmates, and think through how to develop them in their own right.
Villa Spiritus’ goal in its virtue programme is that its students may understand along with the Catechism that “A virtue is an habitual and firm disposition to do the good… it allows the person not only to perform good acts, but to give the best of himself. The virtuous person tends toward the good with all his sensory and spiritual powers; he pursues the good and chooses it in concrete actions" (see CCC 1803).
Academic Formation
Just as the source of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness is one divine being subsisting in three persons, so we study these same transcendentals as present in individual disciplines grounded in one reality.
The programme seeks to pursue truth wherever it is found, honoring the genuine achievements of scientists, poets, and philosophers throughout history. As Saint Augustine exhorts, “let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master” (Augustine, De doctrina christiana II.18). Similarly, Saint Basil the Great writes that “after the manner of bees must we use these writings, for the bees do not visit all the flowers without discrimination, nor indeed do they seek to carry away entire those upon which they light, but rather, having taken so much as is adapted to their needs, they let the rest go. So we, if wise, shall take from heathen books whatever befits us and is allied to the truth” in order to make the honey that flows from the rock (St. Basil, Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature, ch. 4).
All education is to be founded on Revealed Truth… to fit men for this world while it train[s] them for another
St. John Henry Newman, The Rise and Progress of Universities
The Four Pillars of Classical Catholic Education
In keeping with Catholic tradition as expressed through the Personal Ordinariate of St. Peter, Holy House recognizes four pillars of Catholic education:
I. Sacred Worship: Primacy is given to the daily celebration of the liturgical life of the Church, since the first education of the soul is conducted not by programmes, but by the Word of God and sacramental grace. The entire day and school year is therefore punctuated by prayer, with the Holy Mass, as the most important class of the day. It is celebrated according to the Ordinariate Form: the Venerable English Mass said ad orientem in sacral English.
II. Sacred Wisdom: Our students are immersed in the excellence of the Catholic Classical Liberal Arts tradition which fosters the intellectual and moral virtues needed for serious study, for living a Christian life of discipleship, and for sharing the Catholic Faith. Academic rigour in the liberal arts is essential to the formation of rational, free, and virtuous persons, we therefore ensure a firm grounding in literature, grammar, science, and other core subjects.
III. Sacred Music: Music is an integral part of the patrimony of English Christianity, and is therefore central to the curriculum of Holy House. It provides a point of integration for the other core subjects but is more than that: our music programme educates the very soul.
IV. Sacred Art: The great treasury of our Catholic faith contained in our sacred arts and architecture can be accessed only through competent visual literacy skills. By learning to draw more carefully, we learn to see more carefully. Accordingly, we ensure every student is visually literate, with drawing and painting treated as foundational skills essential for both the appreciation and creation of art.
The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.
Socrates
Academic Overview
Senior Division: Grades 9-12
Students in the Senior Division are expected to have mastered the basic skills of reading, writing, and discussing in order to facilitate engagement with the material they study at a more mature level. The skills of reading to organize the text in one’s mind, find key passages, and interpret, as well as writing and discussing to build and communicate complex ideas, will be developed.
Badges worn on clothing became popular (especially in England) in the late Middle Ages as a way of showing an association between individuals. Today this tradition has survived perhaps most notably as a badge on school uniforms. While some schools use a Coat of Arms for this purpose, Villa Spiritus follows the more traditional para-heraldic practice.
Our badge brings together three visual elements: the white dove descending from the sky with the Holy Eucharist in his beak, the Cross placed beneath, and the circle which presents the design and motto in a visually harmonious way. The red and blue school colours subtly recall the blood and water which flowed from the Lord’s side at His crucifixion, while the gold in the design reminds us of the precious value of our Catholic faith.
The Cross, set upon a blue field, points to the Canterbury Cross, discovered in 1867 during excavations in Canterbury, England. The original Anglo-Saxon brooch dates from around AD 850. This image links our local efforts with the wider aims of the Gilbertine Institute, which values the British academic tradition and spiritual inheritance—one that understands education as the formation of judgement and character through disciplined engagement with the wisdom of the past, situated within our Christian word-view. Every Cross, of course, ultimately symbolizes the Catholic Faith and reminds us of Christ Himself.
The dove descending with the Sacred Host forms the central image of the badge. It is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, sent to us for our help and encouragement. At Villa Spiritus, the chapel and the Holy Mass stand at the heart of our common life, and it is therefore fitting to include the image of the Host as a visual reminder of this central Good.
The design is set within a circle—a universal symbol whose meanings include unity, wholeness, and eternity. We strive for a kind and generous unity within the student body at Villa Spiritus, directed towards an integrated education which we hope will ultimately lead to eternal life in the presence of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
Our motto, rendered in Latin, is Deo Domuique, which means “For God and for Home.”
