Academic Bulletin 2020-22

Christendom College: An Overview Christendom College is a coeducational liberal arts college, institutionally committed to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church in conformity with the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

The College was founded in 1977 in response to the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, with the vision of providing a liberal arts education that would fully integrate natural and revealed truth. The purpose of a liberal arts college is to educate for life, to lead the whole man to wisdom, not just to train a worker for a job. The liberal arts develop a human being’s personal abilities to reason, to discover the truth, and to judge rightly. As John Henry Cardinal Newman so accurately observed in The Idea of a University, The man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer . . . or a statesman, or a physician . . . or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist . . . but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to . . . with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense, then . . . mental culture is emphatically useful. (I.vii.6) To turn this vision into the reality which became Christendom College, a rigorous program of studies was designed, with careful consideration for its scope and order. Today, Christendom offers an exceptionally strong, integrated core curriculum in Catholic theology, philosophy, history, literature, political science, economics, the classical and modern languages, mathematics, and science. This core curriculum is required of all students. Only when a student has completed the Core does he or she focus on major concentrations begun in the Core. To potential enrollees, Christendom offers two programs. The three-year program consists of the entire core curriculum and leads to the Associate of Arts degree. The four-year program adds a major and leads to the Bachelor of Arts degree. Required of each major at the baccalaureate level is a senior thesis, a scholarly piece of writing which culminates the student’s four-year immersion in those arts that are called liberales (free) because they equip a person for the kind of life that is worthy of a free human being.

The curriculum at Christendom is special in another way, too. It embodies a Thomistic educational policy; that is, it gives an essential role to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. When a student is graduated with a Christendom B.A. in Philosophy or Theology, he or she will have been helped to read more of St. Thomas’s massive Summa Theologiae than any other Bachelor of Arts in America.

To assure the proper relationship between the College and the Church, Christendom requests all faculty members to affirm their loyalty to the official teaching of the Catholic Church. Faculty contracts state that public rejection of, or dissent from, the teachings of the 11