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The founders of the College
loved ideas, books, and teaching, and believed that the great
tradition of humane letters is a gift to be studied, cherished,
and handed on from generation to generation. They believed
that the highest truths, revealed by God, were the matrix
of good learning, stabilizing and enriching the essential
study of poetry, philosophy, the classical languages, history
and mathematics. The study of these natural disciplines with
the study of theology forms a Christian classicism that has
been the intellectual heart of our civilization for seventeen
centuries, and because these studies are the very form of
the knowing intellect and hence of the person, they have a
perennial significance.
From the beginning, teaching and learning in
the College have been informed by the interaction of the College
List of Texts and teaching and learning in the disciplines, each
discipline being presented through courses in which lectures,
conversation, and student presentations play a part.
In the beginning, when the College was founded
as the Saint Thomas More Institute in 1981, its teaching and learning
activities were carried on in living rooms and hospital corridors.
Our campus in the Merida-Bowie-Lubbock Streets block of Fort Worth
was acquired beginning in 1985. The body of Fellows grew from the
original founders to, typically, eight or nine; the students sharing
in studies grew from eight to fifty-five, but the idea and the work
of the College has remained unchanged: the teaching of the liberal
arts in a way that makes the lives of the Fellows and students an
adventure in the best of learning, that lifts up the heart to truth,
and makes possible a genuinely good life in this time and place
that God has given.
The College of Saint Thomas More is an academic fellowship, faithful
to the teaching and intellectual tradition of the Roman Catholic
Church, sponsored and supported by its Board of Visitors, whose
members represent learning in the Liberal Arts through their
teaching and writing; invite into their company appropriately
prepared students, both baccalaureate and occasional; who wish
to share in this kind of learning; and guide them in attaining
the educational objectives of the liberal arts curriculum through
mastery and interpretation of the texts and ideas it represents.
In addition to the formal learning proposed by its four-year curriculum,
the College serves the metropolitan community by offering informal
opportunities for learning in the liberal arts.
Through its unified, four-year curriculum the College
affords students the opportunity to use the tradition of Western
thought to build for themselves morally and intellectually significant
lives and careers in a world in which the unvarying themes of human
nature and experience engage an ever-changing technical and cultural
context; gives students who complete the curriculum satisfactorily
the scholarly competence that will enable them to pursue those professional
or graduate studies for which the curriculum is appropriate undergraduate
preparation; and seeks to encourage habits and provide opportunities
that will make learning a lifetime vocation for its alumni.
In support of these purposes the College seeks
and admits into its community students who share the goals of liberal
learning, provides an opportunity for alumni and benefactors to
share its work through their generosity, and maintains a Chapel,
a library, an appropriate campus, and appropriate support services.
Research and evaluation that will gauge the success
of the College and enable it to achieve its purpose more effectively
year by year through carefully considered improvements are integral
to the mission of the college
Every academic community has its hero, and to know whom
any community admires is to know something of its character.
As the name of the College proclaims, the pattern for the Academic
Fellowship of the College is Thomas More of Chelsea, a lawyer
who quietly became a saint because of an idea, an idea the defense
of which his friends, even his family, considered improvidently
stubborn, and because of a loyalty to God, which was held to be
at best ill-advised and finally treasonous. A saint at the end,
he was also a man of learning and laughter who loved books and
in whose prose the English that Shakespeare perfected was born.
He gracefully stood for truth and quietly, as quietly as one who
had been chancellor could, gave his life for it.
God our Father, in whose reign lie the peace and fulfillment
of the creation, we beg you to accept and bless our labors, to
give the College prosperity and its members perseverance, virtue,
love of learning, and joy.
We ask your blessing upon all who strive to
make this College a place of witness to your love and to the nobility
of your truth.
We remember before you our benefactors, especially
the founders. May we generously spend ourselves in your service;
and may our gifts and labors bear fruit in a perpetual witness
to your glory and the splendor of your truth.
Which things we ask, beseeching the intercession
of Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, in the Name of Jesus Christ, the
King of Creation.
Amen.
COLLEGIUM CHRISTI REGIS RENOVELLARI VERITATE
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