The cultural revolution which swept across the United States in the late 1960s struck a devastating blow to Catholic higher education. The "Land O'Lakes" statement of 1967, in which Catholic universities formally severed their ties with the teaching Church and repudiated their duty of obedience to her, reflected the age and became the guiding principle for Catholic institutions of higher education. What followed was a wholesale loss of Catholic identity in these institutions. Core Curricula were gutted and theology courses watered down. The very existence of objective truth was in many cases denied. The culture cried that God was dead, and the universities became oracles of boundless information and little wisdom.

No longer could these transformed universities fulfill what had always been the primary purpose of Catholic education: to lead young minds out of narrow perspectives into the world of known truth under the guiding light of the Catholic faith. No longer did they honor the sacred discipline of theology, the Queen of Sciences, which should order and illuminate all the other disciplines. The Queen of Sciences, and with her, genuine liberal education, was abandoned.

Against this cultural background, in this chaotic time, Christendom College was born. In 1977, a small group of Catholic lay men and women joined one another in a new educational enterprise. They publicly embraced the Church and the tradition of learning She has long upheld; embraced Her as Mother and Teacher; embraced Her holy head as Christ's Vicar on earth. They were led by Dr. Warren H. Carroll, whose dream of Christendom College had germinated when he worked as educational director of the Society of the Christian Commonwealth. At the founding they declared:

The only rightful purpose of education is to know the truth and to live by it. The purpose of Catholic education is therefore to learn and to live by the truth revealed by Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life,' as preserved in the deposit of faith and authentically interpreted in the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, founded by Christ, of which the Pope is the visible head. That central body of divine truth illumines all other truth and shows us its essential unity in every area of thought and life. Only an education which integrates the truths of the Catholic faith throughout the curriculum is a fully Catholic education.

Their aim was two-fold: to form their students using a challenging curriculum centered on the truths of Divine Revelation as taught by the Roman Catholic Church and the truths of natural reason as derived from natural law and human experience in fidelity to the Magisterium; and to foster in those students a commitment to the lay apostolate, that is, to the task of transforming the social order in Christ.

Christendom College has grown steadily year by year, student by student, building by building. In 1979, the College purchased the one-hundred acre land tract on the banks of the Shenandoah River in Northwestern Virginia which is still its campus today. The year 1997 marked the twentieth anniversary of Christendom's founding and another very important milestone: the acquisition of the Notre Dame Graduate School of theology.

Until that year, what is now the graduate school had existed as the independent Notre Dame Institute of Alexandria. Its purpose was and continues to be to offer comprehensive instruction in theology and catechetics at the graduate level.

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