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The Abbey’s Mission

August 9, 2024

This past Wednesday, August 7, marked Belmont Abbey’s 2024 Opening Day.

Each year, the Opening Day gathers Belmont Abbey faculty, staff, and leadership to anticipate the new semester, enjoy fellowship, and recall our mission. It always offers a joyful and invigorating moment before we plunge into the excitement and challenges of the academic year, but this time as an added blessing, our recently appointed Bishop Michael Martin joined us on retreat to encourage a renewed focus on the particular and vital mission of Belmont Abbey College. Because his words offered such profound and inspiriting exhortation and such a hopeful challenge, I wanted to share some of his message with you today:

“I think we don’t have the opportunity enough, as practitioners, to focus upon mission,” Bishop Martin began. Regardless of our individual roles or “sphere[s] of influence,” all of us, he explained, are called to be “mission-driven leaders.” Essentially, we’re not just “a learning community that’s sponsored by the monks.” We are a “faith community who learns.” And while the world argues, based on their understanding of academic freedom, “that the mission of the Church is restrictive or antithetical to any healthy, vibrant higher education institution,” ultimately “you can’t live into the fullness of [academic] freedom outside the mission of this college.”

Quoting from the beginning of Pope St. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the bishop reminded us that “a Catholic University’s privileged task is ‘to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.'” The world, he noted, “says you can’t do that, that the search for Truth has to be this blind search,” but “we believe that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and so we can’t comprehend a search for truth” without the source of that truth illuminating our journey. “We need to shine [our Faith] upon our endeavors in the search for Truth,” he continued. “The light of Truth shines on what it is you’re doing and makes what you’re doing possible… That’s what we believe. That’s what Belmont Abbey College believes as part of its mission…

“This can’t be a conversation that’s isolated to Day One. …Belmont Abbey is at the heart of Catholic Education for five states in this Southeastern part of the country. Catholic Education in the Carolinas, in Georgia, in Tennessee, in Alabama looks to Belmont Abbey as the pinnacle. …You’re the standard bearer for every other Catholic educational institution within five states… so own it and be proud to profess it. Be proud to carry that standard and say, We’re here; we’ve planted our flag in the ground back in the 19th century and really founded the Church in this area, and we’re still leading the Catholic educational reality of this area. …Because I’ll tell you I’m looking to you for that… I, the bishop of this part of the state need you to be that, and so I pray for you, and I beg of you carry that banner well… We are here because of something greater than us…

“Constant reflection on the shared mission has to be done so that [each faculty or staff member] can continue, in whatever capacity [they] exist in this college, to affirm it: Yes, that’s what I’m here to do. Yes, that’s why I’m a part of Belmont Abbey – because I want to share this Mission. I want to make this Mission my own… It’s not about me. I want the students to come to know that Truth…

“You’ve got a wonderful opportunity,” the bishop added, “and an incredible uphill battle because God knows [students] are not walking in the door with that perception, with that appreciation.

“Will you advance that Truth in their lives?” Because seeking Truth is not just collecting or categorizing the knowledge of the past. At a Catholic college, it is meant to be an active discernment of the heart, happening for each of us and for each of our students.

Click here to view Bishop Martin’s full speech >>

During the rest of our Opening Day, and with Bishop Martin’s words vividly urgent in our minds, the Abbey community attended Mass and prayed together, shared lunch and dinner, listened to peer representatives and engaged in large and small group discussions on how best to form students in virtue, to address the particular (as well as universal) struggles of the contemporary student, and to support each other in our shared mission.

Now as we prepare to begin a new academic year at Belmont Abbey College, please keep our faculty, staff, monks, and leadership in your prayers, that we may always embrace this mission with faith, joy, humility, and fortitude and that our students may continue to grow in the excellence and virtue that will so powerfully transform their lives.