As an educational institution that believes deeply in its commitment to preserving and promulgating the Catholic Faith, Wyoming Catholic College joyfully accepts Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae. The College strives whole-heartedly to implement the binding norms it lays down for institutions such as ours: “the community is animated by a spirit of freedom and charity; it is characterized by mutual respect, sincere dialogue, and protection of the rights of individuals. It assists each of its members to achieve wholeness as human persons.”

Wyoming Catholic College encourages its faculty to recognize that they enjoy genuine academic freedom, in accordance with the rich Catholic tradition of human rights set in the context of the search for truth and the need to preserve and further the common good. At the same time, professors at Wyoming Catholic College are firmly resolved never to teach anything contrary to Catholic faith and morals as taught by the Church’s Magisterium. Again, we strive to meet the reasonable but exacting standards of Ex corde Ecclesiae:

Every Catholic University, without ceasing to be a University, has a relationship to the Church that is essential to its institutional identity. As such, it participates most directly in the life of the local Church in which it is situated; at the same time, because it is an academic institution and therefore a part of the international community of scholarship and inquiry, each institution participates in and contributes to the life and the mission of the universal Church, assuming consequently a special bond with the Holy See by reason of the service to unity which it is called to render to the whole Church. One consequence of its essential relationship to the Church is that the institutional fidelity of the University to the Christian message includes a recognition of and adherence to the teaching authority of the Church in matters of faith and morals.

To signify an institution-wide commitment to our Catholic identity and to our obligations to teach and respect the Catholic faith in every regard, Catholic faculty at Wyoming Catholic College make a public Profession of Faith and take the Oath of Fidelity at the beginning of each academic year. Non-Catholic faculty make a pledge of respect for the Catholic Church and her teaching authority. Additionally, any member of Wyoming Catholic College’s faculty who teaches theology is obliged to receive a canonical mandatum from the Bishop of Cheyenne. Indeed, “Catholic theologians, aware that they fulfill a mandate received from the Church, are to be faithful to the Magisterium of the Church as the authentic interpreter of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.”