This #GivingTuesday, Help Support Wyoming Catholic College!

Dear Friends,

If your in-box is anything like mine, you’ve already seen several dozen #GivingTuesday appeals today. In fact, I’ve been receiving requests from worthwhile organizations around the country since last week.

There are many worthy causes calling for our support, and all in need of funds. How can we possibly discern which ones are most deserving of our generosity?  That’s a question whose answer must come from individual conscience and the urgings of the Holy Spirit. But as the president of an institution whose very existence depends on the generosity of others, I think of #GivingTuesday as a wonderful opportunity to remind our friends of our great mission.

In a piece today for First Things, Joshua Hren quotes the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, who said that Western secular culture “is a kind of hothouse growth” that shelters us from “the direct impact of reality.” Wyoming Catholic College, by contrast, was founded on the principles of John Senior, who agreed that insulation from reality was precisely the problem. Under Senior’s continuing influence, our students at Wyoming Catholic ride horses, climb mountains, kayak down rivers, explore caves, memorize poems, participate in high liturgy, and study Great Books.

Only twelve years into our existence, our counter-cultural insistence on God-given reality and our highest, most poetic response to it is already making a difference. 

What we are doing here at Wyoming Catholic College is absolutely essential to the revitalization of our society and our culture. Most good people “have a faint notion of what went wrong,” as one of the early participants in WCC’s founding put it; they sense “that the Western traditions have been discarded without anything to replace them except mass culture, addiction to diversion, and radical individualism. God is irrelevant because He is completely absent from the mass culture.”

The crisis of Western civilization, especially the loss of its center in Christian culture, will only be addressed through a great deal of work, and it will be impossible without the grace of God and the generosity of many wonderful people. And so, I ask you to join the faculty, staff, students, and families of Wyoming Catholic this #GivingTuesday. Please consider a gift in support of this exciting and vital educational adventure; this “miracle in the mountains,” as John Senior’s son called us. 

And may God bless you.

Glenn C. Arbery, Ph.D.
President