Thoughts From
the President of a New College

By Father Robert W. Cook

As the founding President of Wyoming Catholic College, I am often asked the question: “Why another Catholic college? Aren’t there enough? You are so small, and it is such a difficult task. Why are you doing it?” In a way, the answer is simple: There are not enough boldly, radiantly Catholic schools in this country, particularly at the collegiate level. Young men and women who are seeking a rigorous education of their minds in truth and a prayerful formation of their hearts in charity have precious few options available to them.

The world of Catholic education has had forty years in which to demonstrate the glories of autonomy, secularization and the conventional trade-oriented and cafeteria approach to coursework. Nonetheless, in my opinion and in that of many in our Church today, this experiment has been tried and found very much wanting.

Present in the audience, I listened carefully to Pope Benedict XVI’s address to Catholic educators. His message, couched in his customarily polished and peaceful language, conveyed a crystal-clear message: Catholic institutions, wake up and rediscover your deepest identity! “Catholic identity,” he declared, “demands and inspires much more [than mere orthodoxy of course content]: namely, that each and every aspect of your learning communities reverberates within the ecclesial life of faith.” (An aside: “orthodoxy of course content” would already be a huge step forward for most Catholic schools in this country, but we see that the Pope has even loftier aspirations.)

The Pope’s very first words, drawn from the Letter to the Romans, set the tone for his entire address: “How beautiful are the footsteps of those who bring good news.” The good news is not academic freedom, it is not earthly credentials and it is not worldly success. The good news is Jesus Christ, His message, His wisdom, His salvation. That is what the Catholic university exists to promote, to proclaim, to study, to ponder, to write and sing about, to pass on from generation to generation, enriched with new insight, thereby enriching the entire world.

Hence, the Pope went on to say: “First and foremost every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth.” First and foremost, then, we are to be a place of meeting God and experiencing the power of His love and His truth—the only love that never disappoints, the only truth that can ground and guarantee every other truth we know. Take away this love and the world is a bleak waste, a meaningless labyrinth; take away this truth and the world is a tale signifying nothing. Young people instinctively know this, which is why they must either find some absolute cause worth living and dying for, or surrender themselves to amnesic indulgence.

Pope Benedict did not mince words. “Each generation of Christian educators,” he reminded us, has a duty “to ensure that the power of God’s truth permeates every dimension of the institutions they serve.” And why? So that young people may lead a life “characterized by all that is beautiful, good, and true.” This venerable triad, which is actually the motto emblazoned on the crest of Wyoming Catholic College, expresses why we were founded: to nourish our students with the perennial and the profound, the substantial and the sacred, the things that truly satisfy the infinite hunger of the human heart.

For this reason, academic freedom is not and could never be our guiding principle; truth is. Academic freedom is an idol that misleads its worshipers to imagine a vain thing: that reason alone can get us safely home. As a matter of fact, reason is not only not capable of realizing our high destiny as children of God, it even collapses in upon itself in mute nihilism when no longer supported by the divine strength of faith. “Only in faith can truth become incarnate and reason truly human,” said the Holy Father.

Academic freedom, in its usual acceptation, also completely misunderstands the very nature of freedom, as indicated by the question, Freedom for what? To be free is only as good as what you are freed to do and to be. As the Pope put it in his speech, “Freedom is not an opting out, it is an opting in—a participation in being itself.” Jesus Christ affirmed to His disciples: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Nothing else can liberate us, nothing else can satisfy us and nothing else can save us from despair—or from the evasion of despair that accounts for much of the industry of modern life.

As a new school, in the face of the tyranny of relativism as well as a pervasive lack of understanding that no part of life is untouched by the mysteries of our faith, we have wanted to chart a course that makes optimal use of our freedom as a new school, unencumbered by the fruitless battles of recent generations.

It is perhaps ultimately quite ironic that the founders of this college, in a world drunk with ideas of innovation and progress, turned with one accord to the traditional practices and studies that make for true intellectual freedom—the “liberal arts” and the liberal (that is, free man’s) education they sustain. Our students learn by a guided tour of the Great Books, supplemented by remaining in touch with God’s first book, creation. Students who receive this kind of education, seemingly remote from the “practical,” are capacitated for a whole host of life skills and vocations that they can pursue with unique versatility and vitality.

It is an embarrassing exercise to go back and compare the rigorous classical education this country’s Founding Fathers received with the simulacrum of education their descendents are getting today. What did those men of action study? They studied logic, rhetoric, Latin, mathematics, physical sciences, literature, philosophy and very often theology. Their studies were a sort of last echo of the Catholic Church’s educational heritage, which is the sole root and finest flower of all university life in the Western world. Our college has the wonderful opportunity to grow up from this root, without compromise, and to harvest its fruits for the good of the Church and of the country.

Pope Benedict XVI concluded his address by quoting his favorite theologian, St. Augustine: “We who speak and you who listen acknowledge ourselves as fellow disciples of a single teacher.” Christ, the Light of the World, is truly the Master at our college, the One to whom we look, the One whose wisdom we strive to embrace, both in and out of the classroom. In this way we strive to create a culture of true freedom, born of “intellectual charity”—the freedom, that is, to know, to pursue, to discover and to cling to all that is really good, beautiful and true.