The Dignitas Personae Pro Life Club made their first official trip! The club made a meaningful trip to our Nation's Capital to participate in the National March for Life. As January comes to an end, we’re embracing Catholic Schools Week, a time to celebrate our community and the values we uphold. With midterms and Christmas break now behind us, we eagerly look forward to the upcoming Easter break. This period is particularly significant for our sophomores and seniors, who are diligently preparing for their thesis projects—an important milestone in their academic journey. As they navigate this home stretch, the focus will be on deepening their faith, refining their skills, and showcasing their achievements.
Don't miss out on the opportunity to join our amazing school community. All applications for enrollment are due on March 24, 2025. Interested in scheduling a shadow day, or have questions about JPIIHS? Email Emma Ward at eward@jp2hs.com!
On January 23, the Dignitas Personae Pro-Life Club embarked on a meaningful journey to Washington, D.C., driven by a shared mission to advocate for the sanctity of life. The primary purpose of this trip was to participate in the National March for Life, an annual event that gathers tens of thousands to promote the dignity of life and raise awareness about the importance of protecting the unborn.
The March officially commenced on January 24th, starting with a special Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a beautiful and sacred space that set a reverent tone for the day's events. Following Mass, the group took the Metro to the National Mall, where the atmosphere buzzed with anticipation. The march began with an inspiring rally, featuring speakers who passionately addressed the need for change and reminded everyone of the essential fight for life.
As we joined tens of thousands of other dedicated marchers, the powerful sense of unity and purpose was palpable. Together, we marched toward the Capitol and concluded our journey at the U.S. Supreme Court building, a symbol of the ongoing battle for justice in the realm of life issues. It was uplifting to witness our students come together under God's guidance, advocating for such a worthy cause—the fight to end all abortions in our country.
The next day, we had the opportunity to make a mini-pilgrimage to the St. John Paul II Shrine, which added an extra spiritual dimension to our trip and allowed us to reflect on the teachings of our beloved patron saint, who was a steadfast advocate for the dignity of human life. Overall, the trip was an incredible experience, leaving our students inspired and more committed than ever to stand up for the value of life.
Saturday, March 1 at 7:00pm
in the Parish Hall at Our Lady of the Valley (1250 7th St., Windsor, CO 80550)
Come join us to celebrate Mardi Gras with some family fun! Join our annual cornhole tournament for a chance to win prizes, and enjoy some treats with friends new and old. All ages are welcome- please bring a beverage to share (alcoholic or non) as your admissions price! Please RSVP and register your cornhole team at this link: https://forms.gle/
Mary InnerstFacts are to be possessed and used. This was the attitude I held implicitly throughout a secular secondary education and into the first two years of community college. “Knowledge” was a conglomeration of strange things somewhere outside of me; if I was fortunate, they would cling superficially to me for a time. Truth was a cumbersome, awkwardly shaped reality that I had to force myself to bear. Each fact, which I considered someone else’s, had to be grasped as an alien object in my mind and I exhausted myself by tenaciously holding each individual fact, terrified of letting any slip through the sieve of my straining mind. It was like trying to cup water in my hands—as soon as I received them, they would already be leaking out and dripping into forgetfulness. Some of my professors denied any objective truths entirely, professing their truth, which made grasping and applying what they taught all the more difficult. I was juggling shadows; my only experience was what Dorothy Sayers describes in The Lost Tools of Learning in her account of the modern pragmatist approach to learning: “We have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more… so that no man ever sees the work as a whole…They learn everything, except the art of learning.”
In short, what I learned was not connatural to me. It felt forced and foreign. It felt like a burden. I loved education for what I could do with it, for what I could get from it, but in the time before I arrived at ITI Catholic University to study the Liberal Arts I never loved it for its own sake. Upon arriving in Trumau, Austria, I was quickly introduced to the benefits of the direct approach to primary sources and the importance of not relying on secondary accounts to substitute for first principles. As our professor and President, Dr. Dolna, is so keen to remind us, if one reads the original, “you cannot be lied to.” Intrigued by the prospect of this medieval approach to learning, I drew close to the first font, logical first principles and the arguments to be derived therefrom, and dove face-first into the sources set before me.
I walked the halls of history, armed with assertions from primary sources. I internalized them, but in doing so encountered an objection, which in turn was answered by someone thinking with me hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, whose thoughts fit like a puzzle piece into my own thought, contributing to the picture that was forming. We were led on these excursions by professors as guides, like Virgil leading Dante through the purgative realm to glimpse something of the eternal stars of virtue beyond. On and on it went, in each subject, until they began to converge, and I realized: all these arguments are in fact, just one. I could, without any fear of losing my footing, step back and survey the expansive horizon opening before me.
As I gradually learned to use the tools of learning, the mysterious formulation of Psalm 42 became an increasingly familiar experience to me: “deep calls to deep.” Something primeval, something deeper than my deepest self shifted; a mysterious transformation was taking place. It was as though I had discovered a new dimension within myself, a deep-seated identity with what I was reading. I had failed, all those years, to recognize the transcendently penetrating nature of knowledge. It is, in a mysterious way, part of me—permeating to the depths—and yet utterly beyond me. I was shocked to be confronted, not by a finite reality, but something infinite. I stared into the face of my Creator. St. Augustine addresses God in the midst of such an intimate encounter: “You were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest” (Confessions 3.6.11). It was here that I found myself approaching a second source, a deeper and sweeter source, a font that the Liberal Arts prepares us for and points to: the supernatural spring of Divine Wisdom itself.
I discovered a marvelous phenomenon: the human intellect, when it operates according to its proper function, unfailingly leads to God, the First Cause. What do we do when we reach the limit of logical arguments, the outer limits of our natural faculties? We jump into the arms of faith. The setting for this leap of mine was ITI, as I graduated to the STM program, building on the solid foundation of the Liberal Arts. It became the meeting place for two aspects crucial for human flourishing, namely, intellectual and spiritual rigor. My days looked something as follows: I left class and jumped directly into the arms of the Church’s sacramental life, comprised of Eastern and Western rites, breathing with both lungs. What I had just learned took supernatural root in my soul. I’ve gained a deep appreciation of the Eucharist especially, in which we are privileged to receive the real body of the very Truth Himself. I returned to class, and the sources were illuminated by the liturgy just celebrated and in turn supported my next experience in prayer. And so, the living cycle continued.
I have spent five years at ITI partaking of these two fonts, “as a deer that longs for running streams,” one natural and the other supernatural. Such a double-contact is transformative—it sweeps the entire person, body, soul, and spirit, into one grand reditus in the very process of revealing his exitus. Education is not just a question of pure empirical knowledge, but a matter of anthropology. The human heart beats out the questions, What am I? Who am I? Who am I for? and stirs impatiently with the restlessness St. Augustine describes as only quieting when the heart rests in her identity in God. Knowing from Whom you came and to Whom you are going tells you what you are and how to act according to your nature. This is freedom. This is the “liberality” implied in the very name “Liberal Arts.”
Everything I learned in this process toward true freedom—yes, even all those seemly disconnected facts that so troubled my earlier educational efforts—points to Christ, the Logos, Who, in turn, reveals something to me about myself. As Benedict XVI observed so beautifully: “Jesus Christ is the personified Truth…Every other truth is a fragment of the Truth that he is and refers to Him.” Learning is no longer a game of grasping at foreign objects with a utilitarian aim, but a living experience of coming to know myself and creation in relation to the Last End, as I strive to conform myself to Truth personified. “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Isn’t this, after all, the ultimate goal of knowing anything? This is proper human education, an education which, in Sayer’s words, “looks to the end of the work,” namely to know and love God for all eternity.
In case you didn’t know (because I sure didn’t), there’s a common means of hunting rabbits at night called ‘Lamping’, and frequently the practices uses hawks to catch the rabbit as it runs from the illumination. I am titling this essay as I am for a specific reason, so hold on to your hats and see how I try to bring the title full-circle.
The last month has been particularly lively at the Hockel household. As some of you may know, we’ve begun fostering two little kiddos with the aim of adoption. This brought our typical level of madness a few decibels louder, so things are going about as expected. But before I speak about this change in the Hawkhouse, let me thank all of you who have been such active supporters to this effort-- all of your gifts of time, the heaps of food in the meal train, the monetary assistance, and the overwhelming tide of prayers has thrown us into a maelstrom of love and makes me so hopeful for the pro-life heart of the Church!
As you surely imagine, adding a few more to the brood of Halcónitos has demanded from all of us (parents and children alike) that we increase in patience and charity very rapidly. We’re getting better at communicating need, and we’re getting pretty good at apologies, too. I readily admit that the growth is fraught with pain, but it’s just providing us a daily—nay, quarter-hourly—reminder of what it means to love as Christ asks. We have to rethink patterns of behavior, slow down so as to consider every communication, and be intentional with each child so that they might receive from their parents what they deserve. And it’s making us reflect with renewed attentiveness all the things in our lives that we’ve let become common.
For example, our oldest came home from school the other day and told me that she didn’t like reading. That is obviously, for me of all people, a red flag. In that moment, we had three kids shouting about magne-blocks (you’d think that two-hundred would be enough for them to share, but somehow it isn’t), and the wee-est one was bellyaching about not getting to cook us dinner that night (sweet of him but it had already been cooked and with a significant amount of his help). In the moment of great clamor and with so many significant stressors there was, let me tell you, a temptation to deny and redirect the lass’ comment about her dislike of reading. Instead, she and I paused and discussed the matter. We roped another one of the kids into the conversation and asked why not—some of her commentary implying it was boring, and more of it being about the stress attached to it which led to it being ‘not fun’. The solution was simple: we read.
I pulled down a book that her auntie had given to me a few years back for my own amusement—a coloring book of mythological creatures. It was rife with passages about fantastical trifles and corresponding pages that could be inked at the reader’s leisure. I made the deal with the lass that for every entry she read aloud to me that I would print her a copy of the coloring page. She read four entries and has, each night since, begged me to read further. And more than this, she’s reading for her siblings, and each time she finds something she doesn’t know or is excited by we’re going on deep-dives into new, intriguing avenues of discover. We read about Pegasus because who wouldn’t want to color that in, and then we read Pegasus was born from the neck of Medusa. Finding she didn’t know who Medusa was, she asked. I told her to go to the library the next day and check out D’Aluaries’ Book of Greek Mythology, which she did. We read the story of Perseus, sharing in mingled excitement and disgust.
Next she read about a creature called “Gamayun”, which was new to me. The creature caught Genevieve’s attention because it had the body of a bird and the face of a beautiful woman. We learned that it was a symbol of wisdom and goodness in the mythos of the Slavs, and when Genevieve asked what ‘Slav’ meant we were able to pull down an atlas from the personal library shelves and pull out or Ruthenian prayer book and introduce her to a people that she didn’t know she already knew. After these sojourns into interesting material and then diving into primary (school) sources, the lass has begrudgingly admitted, “I guess I do like reading.”
So you’ve likely realized the play I am going for with my title. The light, revealing something good, allows for the attentive hawk to be able to chase down and capture its rabbit. A little spark of inspiration allows for the attentive Hock to go down rabbit-holes to find what she’s looking for. It’s not my tightest essay, I admit, but I’ve been more sleep deprived than usual, so cut me some slack.
What I am trying fumblingly to say is that the great gift of being a parent, the primary educator, is not that we are given a chance to parent perfectly (Lord knows) nor that we are at all times able to come up with the right answer. No, the great gift is that we have the chance to form the culture of our children’s hearts. We see their brokenness and we answer it from the wisdom that’s come from our own. When the world threatens to crush them, we don’t teach them to become belligerent but we show them how to sidestep and find a better path. When they begin to feel the oppression of the way of darkness, we can lift our lanterns (with their wicks well-tended) to illuminate for them as best as we’re able the Way of Light.
Blaise A. Hockel,
Headmaster
The Dignitas Personae Pro Life Club made their first official trip! The club made a meaningful trip to our Nation’s Capital to participate in the National March for Life. As January comes to an end, we’re embracing Catholic Schools Week, a time to celebrate our community and the values we uphold…