The Classroom

A flying rubber chicken hits a student in the head, a foam gladius thrusts into another, and a voice rises above the din shouting, “Considete! Bene factum omnes!” It’s just another Latin class at Wyoming Catholic College and everybody—every body—is involved. In addition to the conversational Latin, students can use sign language for “Slow down,” “Say again,” and “I need a break.” Inevitably, these signs make their way from Latin class into the rest of the classrooms. So does the exuberance.

Classes at Wyoming Catholic College are meetings of minds, but minds come in bodies. We gather; we often stand for prayer in chant or song; we sit together in sometimes rickety chairs around folding tables in what might be overheated or underheated rooms; we see, hear, and speak to one another. Why? Because a college (collegium) demands real presence. Education demands the physical reality of opening our books, opening our minds, and opening our eyes, ears, and hearts to each other and to the truths we encounter together at the feet of history’s greatest writers, artists, and thinkers. There is something sacred about the physical classrooms, buildings, and dormitories that facilitate this face-to-face communion as we pursue the truth together.

Learn more about the College’s educational vision at our Academics page.

Faculty and Staff

At many schools—usually due to size—there is a gulf between faculty, staff, and students. Professors lecture, students listen, and aside from Q&A or an occasional visit during office hours, there is little interaction. Not at Wyoming Catholic College. Our classes are small and interactive. Faculty, staff, and students make themselves available to one another.

Lunch typically includes the entire community and we discourage “faculty tables.” In fact, faculty and staff consider lunch with students a daily pleasure. Some table conversations continue class discussions; others are campus small talk or personal sharing and many—if not most—are punctuated by friendly banter and laughter. Beyond the dining hall, we walk together, worship together, pray together, and enjoy the outdoors together. Faculty and staff invite students into their homes for holidays, feast days, special celebrations, or gatherings as simple as pizza and a movie. Students get to know not only faculty and staff, but their spouses and children as well. Life-long friendships form in the drama and joy of life together in Lander.

Learn more about our professors through our Faculty directory.

Outdoor Program

As freshmen spend their first three weeks of college together in the wilderness, there is no getting away from the body. Facing the weather, backpacking cuisine, aches and pains, and tent living, student experience creation—the glories that unfold around them daily, their own physical creation, and their neighbors’. Students discover that they can’t run away from their bodies and their bodily weaknesses. There’s nowhere to hide.

Our bodies are revelatory, a sign that we are built for communion. In our strength, our bodies are ordered toward the service of the other: the weak, the needy, that fellow student with the twisted ankle. In our weakness, our bodies are a sign to us of our utter poverty before the Lord and each other, a sign that we depend on the Grace of God and the love of fellow members of the Body of Christ. Putting their bodies in places where some hard truths reside—hiking the mountain, paddling the river, scaling the rock face, galloping on a horse, snow camping in the shadow of the Tetons, or exploring the depths of a cave—students are confronted, challenged, and changed by reality itself, not its imitations and shadows.

Explore the College’s understanding of the relationship between the body, mind and spirit on our Outdoor Program page.

Student Life

Part of the education of the body is play and student life includes dances—all-school dances, waltz or swing classes, and English Country dancing—intramural sports at least twice a week, class competitions, Spirit Week, bonfires, boxing, foam-sword battles, chariot races, rock throws, and tugs-of-war. Students bike, backpack, rock climb, ski, hunt, fish, cook, paint, draw, make music, and craft in their free time. In all of this, we celebrate life as embodied creatures made in God’s image.

Intellectual life and virtuous living are intimately connected. We understand the good so that we might live the good and, in living the good, grow in understanding. Student life serves the sanctity and dignity of the body in all student interactions. Dorms are separated by sex; men and women may not enter the dorm of the opposite sex. The school follows a modest yet functional dress code supporting the dignity of our intellectual endeavor and the sanctity of the body.

Knowing that the body, as sexual, is a sign of the free, faithful, fruitful, indissoluble gift of love between Christ and his Bride, the Church, for whose purity he was crucified, Wyoming Catholic College fosters chastity, modesty, strong friendships between men, between women, and between the sexes. The school’s policies on dating, pornography, and fornication reflect a love for the Church’s teachings and for our students. Chaplains and professors often work with individuals considering the priesthood or religious life, with couples considering marriage, and with engaged couples during their marriage preparation.

Consecrated to the service of God and a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, our bodies are not to be abused. Drug use, drunkenness, underage drinking, and supplying alcohol to underage students result in disciplinary action and can lead to expulsion from the college. In addition, the college regularly sponsors speakers and discussions about health, fitness, diet, and safety.

For more information, visit our Student Life page.

Technology Policy

When Jesus visited her home in Bethany, Mary chose to sit at His feet, to be physically present with Him. This, Jesus said, was the better part, and it would not be taken from her (Luke 10:38-42).

Technology shapes our bodily habits. Where do we look? Down at our smart phones, up at the sky, or into the faces of our companions? Do we crave the instant gratification of seeing that someone else “liked” our Facebook post or the sustained joy of walking and talking with people we like and who like us? One of the most common descriptions of a saint is that when you are with him or her, it was as if you were the only person that mattered.

Wyoming Catholic College seeks to create a culture of personal presence. This can’t happen in an environment where we keep checking text-messages in the middle of classes, meals, and conversations. Unless we tear our eyes from the screen’s delights, we may never realize the goodness and beauty all around us. So our students have limited access to the Internet and no cell phones on campus.

This policy offers students the opportunity—perhaps an opportunity most people will never enjoy—to spend four years immersed in the immediacy of real, personal, relationships rooted in bodily presence, without electronic distractions. Unencumbered by technology we are able, in Pope St. John Paul II’s words, to make our invisible selves visible to one another. Wyoming Catholic College’s students discover that, without electronic distractions, they enjoy greater intellectual, spiritual, and relational growth. In fact, students come to view the technology policy as a vacation of sorts. Freed from the demands of the virtual world and virtual relationships, they are free to take greater pleasure in the real world and in stronger, more durable friendships with the people around them every day.

Learn more about the College’s understanding of the relationship between technology and education at our Technology Policy page.