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— Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri
Liberal arts education: a waste of money or a practical investment? Learn what successful CEO’s and business professionals have to say about graduates from colleges like SMC. Read More
“In pursuing the liberal arts, students develop capacities that allow them to excel in any endeavor. The best firms know of these capacities and value them. . . . To develop advanced skills in reading, writing, and speaking; to be able to think critically and solve problems; to have experienced a range of disciplines and spheres of knowledge; to become comfortable with difference, ambiguity, and complexity; and to desire to continue to learn – . . . these qualities prepare liberal arts graduates for the positions and challenges that are available to them. . . .” – Mark Roche, Why Choose the Liberal Arts?
“St. Mary’s College is uniquely suited to develop leaders whose rational love is nurtured by grace and disciplined by reason, because it combines a Catholic liberal arts academic formation with the traditional liturgy and a fully Catholic life.”- Dr. Matthew Childs Read More
St. Mary’s College holds Catholic liberal arts education as the key to emerging from the current crisis in the Church and in the world. The restoration of an uncompromised Christian culture, which refuses and rejects all the modernist ideas that distort Jesus Christ and his plan for humanity, serves as the foundation of all our efforts. For this reason, we are committed to the traditional Latin Mass, the very heart of Christian culture. Nourished by the liturgy, our traditional, uncompromised four-year Catholic Liberal Arts curriculum embraces, unwaveringly and unapologetically, the great works of the Western canon, especially those of Aristotle and of St. Thomas Aquinas.
— Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri
Our college forms students who cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues needed to be in the world but not of it, to rise above temporal vicissitudes and to restore confidence in the everlasting, keeping their Catholic faith intact while drawing others to the Truth. Such a formation requires a beauty and integrity of life, solid, not only academically and intellectually, but also socially and spiritually. Study, prayer, friendships, and recreation all flow together into a full and meaningful daily schedule that is challenging but joyful because it is shared with like-minded members of the Mystical Body. Such a life abounds in spiritual joy, peace, and significance because of the profound contact students enjoy with the sole source of all truth, happiness, and stability: Jesus Christ.
“Truth incarnate proclaims, ‘the truth shall set you free – veritas liberabit vos,’ and the Liberal Arts seek to liberate fallen man from ignorance, pettiness, and provincialism by putting him broadly and profoundly in contact with truth. . . . [which is] not narrow, not confined, not specialized, but [manifested in] many aspects of our complex reality . . . .thus any authentic liberal arts curriculum stresses the formation of intellectual virtue, habits of upright thought. . . . a solid intellectual foundation that supports balance and harmony between work and play, strain and sleep, family and friends, feast and fast, conversation and contemplation. . . . “ – Dr. Louis Shwartz Read More
How is love the motive force of every deliberate act—good or evil—of man? One of the “great questions” explored at SMC. Read More
Did you know that the shift in early 20th century America from traditional liberal arts in colleges to elective and specializing undergraduate curricula in universities was motivated by Protestant liberalism and the progressivist modernist agenda to eliminate the Church’s influence in higher education? C.S. Lewis pithily describes the difference between the “old” and the “new” college education: “the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.” Read More
“These [the spiritual aspects of the SMC formation] are not nice extras. The spiritual life is the essential of human life. Are we going to form the Catholics of the future by divorcing their higher education from the life of their souls? Is there a time of their lives where guidance, the liturgy, the sacraments, and a truly Catholic atmosphere are more needed?”
“If you ask me after eight years of priesthood, three years spent teaching at St. Mary’s College, six years spent teaching twelfth grade Religion, three years as a school principal, two years preaching retreats, a year and change as vocations director, if you could say there is one thing that you would recommend to young people to make sure that they were able to live a truly integrally traditional Catholic life, what would it be? I would unhesitatingly say St. Mary’s College. Of all the other things that we try to do for our young people, none of them compares. None of them is able to give the same depth and solidity of formation. . . . this is our best tool: St. Mary’s College, certainly.” – Fr. John McFarland