Georgia’s new Catholic college: a parent’s perspective

By Paul Thigpen

When General James Edward Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia in 1733, the new colonial charter included four prohibitions: There were to be no slaves, no rum, no lawyers—and no Catholics.

We’ve come a long way.
Today Catholics in our state are multiplying more rapidly than ever. And one happy indicator of the Church’s growth is that Georgia college students seeking a Catholic education no longer have to leave the state.

In the little town of Dawsonville, about an hour north of Atlanta, Georgia’s first residential Catholic college is entering its third year of operation. Southern Catholic College (known to its friends as SCC) is a co-educational liberal arts college with a challenging faith-based curriculum, a firm commitment to the Church, and a dynamic spiritual life.

The school’s ties to our diocese continue to strengthen. Dr. Frank Rossiter and Sister Lourdes Sheehan, both of Savannah, serve on its Board of Directors and Board of Fellows, respectively. And several students from our diocese are now enrolled there.

Eighty-three members of the new freshman class have brought the total enrollment to 191, from 20 states and abroad. That’s a remarkable number for a private college that’s still so young. But it doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who are acquainted with the SCC community.

My son, Elijah, is one of those new freshmen. What our family witnessed during a recent orientation weekend left us thinking: When the word gets out about what’s happening here, Catholic students all across Georgia and beyond will be mobbing the admissions office to get in.

As we approached the campus, off a winding rural road, we were first struck by the natural beauty and serenity of its setting. Nestled in the hills with mountains on the horizon, the campus was once a golf resort. Former golf villas are now dorms, overlooking a peaceful lake beside an expansive green. The state’s tallest artificial waterfall feeds an impressive swimming pool, near the clubhouse now converted into a chapel. Deer, rabbits, an occasional wildcat, and other wildlife sometimes venture close.

Yet even more striking than the school’s physical beauty is its spiritual focus. Every administrator, faculty member, staff person and returning student we met during the orientation weekend—from the founder to the janitor—was enthusiastically, unabashedly Christ-centered.

Pope John Paul II once spoke of how the mind must seek truth by soaring on the wings of faith and reason. SCC’s “integrated core curriculum,” as they call it, invites students to do just that. Study in every academic discipline there is rooted in the principles of the intellectual life set forth by Church documents such as Fides et ratio and Ex corde ecclesiae.

At Southern Catholic, one speaker commented, “Christ is the unseen teacher in every classroom.” Assisting Him is an engaging, faith-filled faculty. They are also well-credentialed: All fulltime professors at SCC have a Ph.D., a claim that few colleges and universities, private or public, can make.
The chapel serves as the heart of an active sacramental life on the Southern Catholic campus. Father Brian Higgins is the newly appointed chaplain—the former vocations director for the Archdiocese of Atlanta and a spiritual dynamo with a heart to pastor students. Mass is celebrated daily and confessions are heard several times a week. Eucharistic Adoration, Rosaries, Stations of the Cross, spiritual retreats and Church feast days are frequent events on the campus calendar.

For me, the high point of the orientation weekend came with the New Student Investiture ceremony. After a public statement of their intent to glorify God in all their endeavors as students, the young people prayed together a blessing on their families, expressing their gratitude for their parents’ model of faith and love. In their turn, the families prayed together a blessing on the students before heading home without them.

It left me all choked up and misty-eyed.
As a former university professor, I’ve witnessed firsthand how many young adults fall away from the Church during their college years. It’s every Catholic parent’s worst nightmare: Go deeply in debt to provide your children with a decent education, only to find that the tens of thousands of dollars were spent to turn them into pagans.

If ever there was a school where Catholic families can be confident that the campus culture will support rather than undermine spiritual growth, this is it. In one of his homilies, Father Higgins summarized the situation well.
“How often do we hear someone say, ‘In college, I lost my faith.’ At Southern Catholic, we want to hear you say, ‘In college, I fell in love with Christ!’”

My son, I can rest assured, is in good hands.

Paul Thigpen, Ph.D., is editor of The Catholic Answer, a national bimonthly magazine, and director of The Stella Maris Center for Faith and Culture in Savannah.

For more information about Southern Catholic College, call the Admissions Office toll-free at 866-722-2003; e-mail admission@southerncatholic.org; or go online to www.southerncatholic.org.