Mater Dei is a Catholic lay apostolate committed to the formation of high school students in Duluth, Minnesota. Our vision is to create a thriving oasis of Catholic culture in our society, where high school 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 that is affordable, accessible and authentically Catholic.
Affordable
We operate a low-cost financial model and increase donor engagement in order to keep our program tuition-free with only minimal registrations fees.
Accessible
We operate a flexible hybrid education model to serve families from conventional school and homeschool backgrounds, with a remote component to serve families in distant, rural communities.
Authentically Catholic
We educate students with a classical curriculum grounded in the Catholic intellectual tradition, while recognizing the role of parents as primary educators.
As parents, we have the right and duty of providing a Catholic education for our children. For over forty years, the lack of options for Catholic high school education in 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, flexible, and practical in our ever-changing world.
Together we are paving the way forward, embracing our full potential as primary educators of our children. Our inspiration comes from the Church:
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).
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).
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).
