Our Life, Our Sweetness and Our Scholarship

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Rosary seller does what he can to aid Catholic education

Tim Drake, St Joseph, MN, who is a Senior Writer for the National Catholic Register, has an article this week on a company in Oregon that proivdes scholarships to students at Catholic colleges whose professors have the Mandatum from their Bishop:

With seven children and a single income from a Catholic non-profit, Jennifer and Douglas Alles didn’t know how they would face the rising costs of higher education: Over the past six years, college costs have nearly doubled.

The Alles’ two oldest sons are in college now. Nathaniel is a senior at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. Patrick is a freshman studying pre-med at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan. The Alleses live in Ridgefield, Wash.
How to pay for their kids’ noble academic aspirations?

Enter a small Catholic retailer on the grow.

Last year one Seth Murray, owner of The Rosary Shop in McMinnville, Ore. (rosaryshop.com), came up with the idea of offering academic scholarships to students attending Catholic colleges and universities that publicly support the canon-law mandatum. Pope John Paul II, in his 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae (On Catholic Universities), said, “It is the honor and responsibility of a Catholic university to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth.
This is its way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has “an intimate conviction that truth is its real ally ... and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith” (No. 7).

The mandatum, which is required of all teachers of Catholic theology in any institute of higher learning, states that professors will teach authentic Catholic doctrine and refrain from advancing anything as Church teaching that is contrary to the Church’s magisterium.

“We’ve been in business for 10 years,” explains Murray, who owns and operates the store with his wife, Tyra. “This is the first time we’ve had a profit worth measuring. We wanted to do something to promote Catholic education.” [...snip] Read the Rest