Monday, April 22, 2013

Walsingham and Newman in Kansas City!

Everything's up to date in Kansas City! Including this great news from the National Catholic Register:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., is set to become the home of Christ College, a new Catholic liberal arts school inspired by the thought of Blessed John Henry Newman.

“He’s really the guiding intellectual light of what we’re trying to do,” Brinton Smith, president of the Walsingham Society of Christian Culture and Western Civilization, told EWTN News on April 17.

“His work has been an inspiration, and we look to his The Idea of a University as one of our primary texts, in how we see things and what we’d like to accomplish as a Catholic liberal arts college.”

Christ College is a project of the Walsingham Society, which is based in Dallas. The college plans to lease space at the diocesan chancery in Kansas City, Mo., and begin with a pilot program this fall.

The pilot program would include a few courses, starting with Latin and theology, Smith said, and would be followed with the full curriculum being introduced to the freshman class in the fall of 2014.

Smith met the diocesan chancellor, Jude Huntz, at a conference on Anglicans who had converted to Catholicism. Huntz was enthusiastic about the prospect of a liberal arts college and introduced Smith to Bishop Robert Finn.


The mission of The Walsingham Society, which is NOT named for Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's spymaster, but for Our Lady of Walsingham, is:

to cultivate the minds and improve the lives and communities of its members through guided critical reading and discussion of the perennial truths found within the great books of the Western intellectual tradition. The canon of texts explored in our lectures, seminars, and tutorials resides within the disciplines of theology, philosophy, literature, music, art, and classical languages, each of which contains its own distinct mode of vision and knowing. The vision and knowledge of the great poets, scholars, and artists of the West provide foundational insights into beauty, goodness, and truth that are studied with love and passed down from tutor to student in a learning environment that is leisurely yet exhaustive.

THE WALSINGHAM SOCIETY has its mission the representation, on behalf of the great intellectual and imaginal tradition that has formed the Christian West, of those things true, beautiful, and good in a culture that accepts that truth is unknowable, beauty an illusion, and the pursuit of goodness an offense to the existing moral pluralism. The mission of the Society is rooted in an understanding of the nature and purpose of every person, which at its highest is to love and to enjoy as well to endure.

THE MOTTO of the Society is Caritas cum Consilio, Love with Understanding. The programs of the Society are based upon the conviction that the most important thing in this world is a person, hoping for goodness, seeking fulfillment according to the way he or she has been given. The Society’s success is measured by its ability to lift up the eye of the heart of those who share this adventure with us to the world of significance that lies beyond utility, in the precincts of truth, giving them access to the great tradition through the Great Books, and also through the art and music that is collateral to it.

As you might expect, according to the same National Catholic Register article linked above, "Many of the society’s members are Catholic converts from Episcopalianism and attend Masses of Anglican use or through the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter." The college in Kansas City will begin with Latin and theology as a pilot program and then blossom into the full Liberal Arts curriculum in the fall of 2014. Sounds like a great idea of a university!

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