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Rebuilding in the Heartland

On a recent road trip, my family explored a corridor running through the center of the country, home to many vibrant communities that can serve as models in our efforts to live the faith and share its beauty.

A 2014 photo of the sculpture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Monument at Benedictine College, Atchison. (Image: August Simon/Wikipedia)

It’s amazing what happens in what many people call “flyover” country, where many Catholics quietly are going about the work of rebuilding in the nation’s heartland. On a recent road trip through Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma, my family explored a corridor running through the center of the country, home to many vibrant communities that can serve as models in our efforts to live the faith and share its beauty.

Setting out from Denver, we followed the South Platte River into Nebraska, leading us toward Lincoln, with its Newman Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture, founded by Bishop James Conley. Housed at the Newman Center, with its stunning church, it offers University of Nebraska students an immersion into the Great Books.

After a family reunion in southern Iowa, we headed south to Missouri, praying alongside of the nuns with heavenly voices at the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus in Gower (which has released many popular CDs). Their average age appeared below 30, with enough vocations for a new foundation, the Monastery of St. Joseph in Ava, Missouri.

From there we dropped in on some friends in Atchison, Kansas, the home to Benedictine College, a major site for collegial renewal, perched on the bluffs overlooking the Missouri River.

We headed further south to Fort Scott to check in on developments at St. Martin’s Academy, a boarding school for high school boys, which incorporates regular farm work and hands-on experiences.

Finally, we landed at Clear Creek Abbey, outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I am an oblate. I gave a talk to the monks on the relation of beauty and worship, and my four boys and I were able to enjoy the abbey’s wholesome food grown and produced on the abbey grounds. The monastery was founded in 2000 with just 12 monks, and they are now approaching 60, with a new wing of the monastery rising, alongside of their half-completed Romanesque church.

Like these growing institutions, there is a story to be told about Catholic efforts to rebuild Christian culture. Todd Hartch has begun to paint this picture in his A Time to Build Anew: How to Find the True, Good, and Beautiful in America (Angelico, 2021). I actually found the book during our trip on the coffee table of my good friend, Dr. Richard Meloche, head of the Alcuin Institute for the Diocese of Tulsa, which steeps teachers and catechists in the treasures of Catholic culture.

Hartch points out that even though many committed Catholics may read books or study theology, “they do not know how to spend their time. The culture is declining noticeably, their local church offers little of interest, and the world of politics seems crass and unchangeable, so they work and read and pray and attend Mass but make no difference to the world around them. They know they should be doing something, but they do not know what to do or how to do it. They might know what is true, but they do not know how to communicate or teach truth. They might know what is good, but they do not know how to do good, or are afraid to start. The ugliness and banality of their world drives them to despair, but they do not know how to beautify it” (14).

To help us reflect on what to do, his book identifies “those who have lived well so that twenty-first-century American Catholics can follow their example. Of course, your own gifts and talents are unique, as is your specific situation, so you should not copy them blindly or mechanistically. Rather, study them, take inspiration from them, and adapt their insights and methods to your circumstances” (2).

His examples are Frederick Hart’s sculpture, the Sisters of Life, the Dominicans of the St. Joseph Province, Franciscan University of Steubenville, the Notre Dame School of Architecture, and mayor Joe Riley’s work revitalizing Charleston.

Chapter three focuses on one of the most impactful educations programs of the last century, one that influenced many of the places we visited on our trip: the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at the University of Kansas.

Running throughout the 1970s and spearheaded by John Senior, Dennis Quinn and Frank Nelick, IHP took undergraduates through four semesters of a living immersion into the great tradition. Students read the Great Books, accompanied by humanizing experiences that included memorizing poetry and folk songs, stargazing, speaking Latin, waltzing and touring Europe. Students learned poetically through a direct immersion into reality that reawakened their minds and imagination in wonder.

This awakening led more than 200 of them into the Catholic Church, inspiring vocations (including founding monks of Clear Creek) and many other initiatives to pass on IHP’s legacy, such as the Newman Institute and St. Martin’s Academy.

As we consider what we can do, the wonderful work of Catholics in the heartland should encourage and inspire us. We, too, can rebuild, if we gather like-minded people together to pursue the true, the good and the beautiful. It’s amazing the impact that even one strong community can have.


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About Dr. R. Jared Staudt 75 Articles
R. Jared Staudt PhD, serves as Director of Content for Exodus 90 and as an instructor for the lay division of St. John Vianney Seminary. He is author of How the Eucharist Can Save Civilization (TAN), Restoring Humanity: Essays on the Evangelization of Culture (Divine Providence Press) and The Beer Option (Angelico Press), as well as editor of Renewing Catholic Schools: How to Regain a Catholic Vision in a Secular Age (Catholic Education Press). He and his wife Anne have six children and he is a Benedictine oblate.

8 Comments

  1. It would behoove everyone to take a look at the website for St. Martin’s Academy. Just what we need to invigorate a moribund Church and as a resource for a clergy/hierarchy of the future.

  2. There’s a lot of good things going on in flyover country for sure. I think everyone should take a little road trip and find that out for themselves.

    • I agree. I live in NE Ohio, and we have a thriving, devout, and very faithful Newman Center which calls my parish home. They attend and actively participate in daily Mass (assisting as servers, readers, and Eucharistic Ministers), attend monthly Adoration and Confession, help at the parish doing the dirty work of weeding, scrubbing, and serving the poor, and far more. When Spring Break rolls around, instead of going to the beach for a wild time, they serve at soup kitchens or take a trip to Appalachia or our own backyard here and clean and reconstruct homes for the needy or elderly. They are a pure joy, and so is my entire parish. We are not wealthy, but we joyfully serve the Lord under the leadership of our very faithful young pastor. God is good!!!

  3. Mass attendance, praying, learning theology, do make a difference in the world.
    It may not be tangibly apparent, but our prayers were part of the battle to overturn Roe v. Wade. Further, every mass is a victory against evil.

  4. This is the heart of the new Catholic renaissance, right here- these are the new institutions rising up to replace the declining western institutions who have forgotten their roots.

4 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

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  3. Rebuilding in the Heartland – Via Nova Media
  4. Rebuilding in the Heartland, Supernatural Gifts That Await Body and Soul in Paradise, and More Great Links! - JP2 Catholic Radio

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