MISSION

Mater Dei is a Catholic lay apostolate committed to the education and formation of high school students. We operate a Catholic hybrid high school located in Cloquet, Minnesota. Our vision is to create an oasis of Catholic culture in our society where students can receive high-quality intellectual and spiritual formation, regardless of where they live or what they can pay. Our mission is to provide higher education prep for homeschool families that is affordable, accessible and authentically Catholic.

HISTORY

As parents, we have the right and duty to provide a Catholic education for our children. For over forty years, the lack of options for Catholic high school education in the Diocese of Duluth was a cause of distress that we took to the Lord in fervent prayer. We prayed for a Catholic high school. We prayed for a refuge from the secular culture and ideology being imposed upon our children in their formative high school years. We prayed for a high school education that would prepare them for a life of wisdom and virtue, grounded in the truth, beauty and goodness of our Catholic faith. For over forty years, this prayer was left seemingly unanswered.

But the Lord works in unexpected ways through unexpected channels and thus, Mater Dei Apostolate was founded in 2019. It required an act of surrender and complete trust, as we ventured into the unknown with our “Bethlehem model” of education, as our beloved, late Bishop Paul Sirba liked to call it. The Lord in His wisdom foresaw the need for a new model of education for high schoolers that would be affordable, accessible, and authentically Catholic in our ever-changing world.

We launched our program in the west end of Duluth with 9th grade in the fall of 2019, adding an additional grade each year thereafter, overcoming many obstacles along the way. With joy in the Lord, we welcomed our first full 9-12th grade hybrid high school in the fall of 2022.

Our local diocesan school, Stella Maris Academy, launched its own conventional Catholic high school in Duluth, in the fall of 2022. After discussion and exploration with the Stella Maris team about the potential for a merger, it was ultimately decided, with the guidance of Bishop Daniel Felton, that the distinct homeschool/hybrid education model of Mater Dei Apostolate should be retained, strengthened, and refocused to address the needs of families south of Duluth, within the Cloquet Deanery.

Encouraged with clarity of purpose, we are working to provide an affordable option for Catholic high school education that is accessible for families along the I-35 corridor from Duluth all the way down to Pine City. The simplicity and adaptability of our hybrid education model is ideal to serve a large geographic area, with potential for the establishment of satellite campuses as our program grows. With this long-range goal in mind, the decision was made to relocate Mater Dei Apostolate to the city of Cloquet beginning in the fall of 2023.

We are at the forefront of a movement to revitalize Catholic high school education in an innovative way. We are paving the way forward, embracing our full potential as primary educators of our children. Our inspiration comes from the Church:

Code of Canon Law

Parents and those who hold their place are bound by the obligation and enjoy the right of educating their children. Catholic parents also have the duty and right of selecting those means and institutes by which, in light of local circumstances, they can better provide for the Catholic education of their children (Can. 793,1).

Apostolicam Actuositatem (Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Vatican II)

Since, in our own times, new problems are arising and very serious errors are circulating which tend to undermine the foundations of religion, the moral order, and human society itself, this sacred synod earnestly exhorts laymen—each according to his own gifts of intelligence and learning—to be more diligent in doing what they can to explain, defend, and properly apply Christian principles to the problems of our era in accordance with the mind of the Church (Ch. II, 6 Apostolicam Actuositatem).

Quadragesimo Anno (Encyclical, Pope Pius XI)

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them (Quadragesimo Anno, 79).