For 28 college students, a three-week stay at the Schloss Wissen Castle in northern Germany was a small taste of heaven.
These students participated in the Catholic Worldview Fellowship, a monthlong summer immersion course that exposes college students from across the United states to the richness of Catholic culture and history.
Now in its eighth year, the program has 163 alumni who the Catholic Worldview Fellowship Executive Director Father Ryan Richardson, LC, hopes will go out and transform the culture.
“We will not know the success of the fellowship in the days and weeks right after we finish the course,” Father Richardson told Our Sunday Visitor. “But we’ll know how successful we are two years from now, four years from now, six years from now based on what our fellows are doing. We are forming leaders who are going to evangelize culture, who are going to be protagonists of culture change for the rest of their lives.”
To prepare the students to evangelize culture, the Catholic Worldview Fellowship seeks to form students intellectually and spiritually within a rich community. During the monthlong program, students study and live in the Schloss Wissen, a castle in northern Germany, for three weeks and then spend a week in Rome, experiencing the heart of the Catholic world.
“It is one thing to just go abroad, study Italian, or … study architecture, and get your credits … but your prayer times, your culture experiences, your community times, the formation that you receive will not all be integrated together,” Father Richardson said. “The Catholic Worldview Fellowship tries to make sense of all the different elements in my life and how they work together and that they can’t be seen totally apart from one another.”
An academic and spiritual challenge
As a seminarian for the Legionaries of Christ, Richardson felt called to begin a Catholic immersion program after reflecting on his own college experience. While he was in college, Richardson participated in a similar program, the Prince of Liechtenstein program, which he says was a transforming experience.
“The Prince of Liechtenstein program transformed my life; it totally transformed my worldview. It made me think outside of just my own American culture,” Father Richardson said. “It wasn’t until I came to Rome, though, to study theology, that the idea to form a similar program kept coming back up.”
“So, I went to my spiritual director and told him that this kept coming up in my prayer and he encouraged me to pursue launching the program.”
Thus the Catholic Worldview Fellowship was born, and Richardson, along with a team of lay people and other Legionaries, developed a program meant to challenge students both academically and spiritually, all while helping fellows to experience the broader world.
For three weeks, students take classroom courses focused on answering key questions such as: What is a Catholic worldview? How did the Church develop a worldview? How can having this worldview influence the world?
The class is not a typical college course. Each day begins with a brief lecture, then students have an assigned reading time, followed by small discussion groups. The day concludes with a discussion involving the entire class.
Historic Catholic towns
Learning is not contained merely to the classroom, as the fellows take a variety of outings to nearby German cities such as Xanten, Achaean and Cologne to learn about Germany’s rich Catholic history before heading to Rome for a week.
Fellow Nick Tarini, a second-year seminarian studying at Holy Cross in South Bend, Indiana, found these outings to be beneficial as students saw how what they were learning in the classroom applies to daily life.
“I found the academic portion of class to be applicable to real life especially in terms of evangelization and how it interacts with Church history,” Nick Tarini, a fellow studying as a second-year seminarian for the Holy Cross brothers told Our Sunday Visitor. “We were able to see the physical evidence of this when we visited historic towns like Trier and Aachen, which helped me to contextualize the material learned in class and apply it to my life.”
While students enjoyed experiencing German and Italian culture, many fellows such as Allison Newkirk, a junior at the University of Missouri, found that the intense spiritual formation — involving daily Mass, Holy Hour, and weekly spiritual check-ins — was the highlight of the program.
“Through the Catholic Worldview Fellowship’s emphasis on daily habits of prayer, I felt like the program truly changed my life in a tangible way,” Newkirk said. “I was able to encounter the Lord’s personal love for me and just learn about his thirst for intimacy with not just me, but with every single person.”
Authentic relationships
The third critical component of the fellowship was the vibrant community. Fellows came from a variety of colleges across the country ranging from state schools like North Carolina University to small liberal arts schools like Benedictine College. As a student at Florida State University, a large state school, Gracie Rudnick appreciated the small Catholic community the fellowship offered as it inspired her to go out and evangelize.
“Every person radiated the love of Christ in a unique way. Part of the mission of the program is to teach students how to evangelize culture and one way this was achieved was through the love and friendship that everyone showed for one another,” Rudnick said. “Through these authentic relationships I was able to become more of who God made me to be because of the support and love and now I feel ready to return to campus and evangelize!”
Through this community, the fellows each made lasting memories, from biking 30 miles to the Netherlands, to singing classic American tunes in the Cologne airport after the group’s flight to Rome was canceled due to the recent CrowdStrike tech outage.
“There were so many moments of joy throughout the fellowship that stick out such as spinning on a merry-go-round at a Biergarten after a canoe trip down a river,” Newkirk said. “However, I think the one that stands out to me is the one that wasn’t supposed to happen — singing in the airport after our flight was canceled. The joy and support everyone displayed during these challenges showed the power and impact of this program.”
It is through these memories and friendships that the fellowship will have a lasting impact on attendees, Fr. Richardson said.
“The most important part of this program is that the fellows form friendships that will last a lifetime,” Richardson said. “Students will forget … places, things that they’ve seen, but they won’t forget the relationships and the relationships. … And that’s where the new initiatives will continue to blossom and grow.”
Walking pilgrimage to Kevelaer
For Rudnick and the other fellows, they began to see the fruits of the program during their last cultural outing in Germany, a walking pilgrimage to Kevelaer.
Kevelaer is the site of a shrine to Our Lady, Consoler of the Afflicted. Pilgrims frequently travel to the town to light a candle seeking the Blessed Virgin’s intercession. The fellowship began and ended with a pilgrimage to the small town, providing the fellows with a full circle moment and the ability to reflect on the graces they received.
“The pilgrimage to Kevelaer on our last day in Germany will be one of my favorite memories from the program,” Rudnick said. “I loved walking through the German countryside with the other fellows talking about our experience on the program. It was such a beautiful opportunity to reflect on all the graces that God had given us, and to look back on everything that had happened over the past three weeks!”
