Belmont Abbey College: Preparing to Fight

by Dr. Jeff Mirus

Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina has been striving for the past few years to become a more thoroughly Catholic institution of higher education. The College has a long tradition which extends back to its founding in 1876 as St. Mary’s College by the Benedictine monks of Belmont Abbey. The school changed its name to Belmont Abbey College in 1913. In the wake of John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic higher education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which was issued in 1990, Belmont Abbey has been prominent among American Catholic colleges and universities in attempting to represent ever more faithfully the mind of the Church in education.

Many readers will be familiar with the engaging “Got Monks?” advertisements used by the College to attract students in recent years. Like most Catholic colleges and universities, Belmont Abbey College found itself adversely affected by the collapse of Catholic culture which dominated the second half of the twentieth century. The school's faculty became less consistently committed to Catholic principles and the student body followed suit. But new leadership brought change: improved hiring practices, deliberate recruitment of students from stronger Catholic families, and more consistent academic policies. The College is now on the Cardinal Newman Society’s list of twenty-one Catholic colleges and universities in America which get a clean bill of Catholic health...  Read the whole article.