Recently I was privileged to be the musical guest on the Dr. Katherine Albrecht show, a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Nashua, NH.

Dr. Albrecht was in the audience of the juggling show in February which took place at the Nashua Public Library. Our boys made a wonderful impression on her, and after discussing who we were and the mission of our school she asked me to come on the radio to discuss the music program. I agreed and gave her several of our CDs.

The topic of the show was Sacred Music, but we also had a chance to discuss Gregory the Great Academy and the unique educational experience it offers. Dr. Albrecht was not only interested in the musical aspects of our school but the entire curriculum. It is great to know that our school and the efforts of the students have now reached thousands across the country. This was a wonderful experience for me personally and a tremendous opportunity to spread the word about the academy.

We were able to highlight music from our most recent album Missa Je Vous Salue and the current students from Gregory the Great House of Studies.

Please click the link below to listen to the interview, which runs about an hour in length.

• Listen Online Here

(The whole show is not currently available…stay tuned!)

Last week I had the privilege of making another visit to Thomas More College, where the boys of Gregory the Great House of Studies are currently in residence. I am happy to report to everyone that not only are the students doing well in the snowy north, but that the tradition of St. Gregory’s Academy continues to thrive.

I arrived Monday evening to a warm reception from the students and staff. After the pleasantries and a little settling in, we got right to work. With each visit, I try to bring something new into the picture. This week would be no exception, and a surprise for everyone was in store. The students were unaware that I had brought an instrument for everyone to borrow for the week. That instrument would be theirs to practice and learn a tune on until Friday, when we would all get together for something called a “jam session.” With great rapidity the boys chose from a stock of ukuleles, recorders, an Appalacian dulcimer, fife, melodica, and various other instruments. The activity was an instant hit! (More on that later.)

Tuesday was our first big rehearsal, and the boys were immediately receptive to the Sacred Music program I had developed for the week. Within the scope of our first meeting we had already worked through the new 3-Part Mass setting which I had written for them, and gone over several of the Gregorian propers for the Friday Mass. In the evening several of the boys, my “small group” of more advanced singers, willingly skipped out on much of the Mardi Gras festivity just to continue working on the music. Needless to say, that was extremely heartening.

The week continued in the same vein. Each day we had at least 3 hours of rehearsal, and the small group giving an extra hour of free time in the evenings. They became so good by Thursday afternoon that we decided to make some recordings, which you can hear below.

Of course there was much more than music going on throughout the week. The St. Julian’s Juggling Troupe was also preparing for their first big show at the Nashua Public Library, there was a huge Mardi Gras celebration, liturgy on Ash Wednesday, and (of course) classwork. It is quite a thing to see these teenagers handle so much activity at once and with so much success.

The music week culminated with the singing of a Traditional Latin Mass for the Friday After Ash Wednesday. There were some very difficult chants which the boys sang beautifully. We received many compliments and even a spontaneous ovation at lunch initiated by the priest!

Now we come back to the jam session activity. After lunch on Friday we all got together in the students’ dorm. Several of the boys had actually prepared a piece to play but others were struggling. For those less musically inclined a failsafe was miraculously provided. Folk music began to sound from the guitars and ukes while everyone joined in doing their best. It was a great time had by all with much laughter and revelry.

I have to say that the best part of my visit was not an activity, or a particular song we sang, or even the week’s festivities, but the effort on the part of the students in everything we did. They were genuinely excited and motivated to sing challenging music and also to put in the necessary work to do it properly. As a teacher, you really can’t ask for more than that. May God continue to bless the students and staff of Gregory the Great!

Sincerely in Christ,
Matt Williams

Recordings – Both Sacred and Folk

• Kyrie – 3pt – 2013
• Sanctus – 3pt – 2013
• Agnus Dei – 3pt – 2013
• MEDLEY
• Loch Tay

Photos

Mr. Howard Clark is the committee director, assisted by Mr. Sean Fitzpatrick and Mr. Paul Prezzia. In recent weeks, Mr. Clark and Mr. Fitzpatrick they have been scouting properties, communicating with diocesan officials, canon lawyers, and insurance agents, working with realtors, and gleaning information on founding schools. Mr. Prezzia has been lending his aid in the many clerical tasks that this project requires, such as researching and filing initial paperwork for a private independent institution. Together, they are enthusiastic and absolutely committed to this project, working hard to overcome the many inherent and inescapable challenges.

The Clairvaux Institute and the committee members are grateful for this opportunity to lay the groundwork for a new beginning, and also for the continuing support from alumni and friends of the old academy. Although in beginning a new school, smaller scale and numbers must initially be anticipated, the intention is to grow, expand, and become a stronger school than St. Gregory’s ever was; with hopes of founding a permanent campus built to suit the school’s specific needs. To this ultimate and grand end, the committee is looking to lease a property that can meet the immediate needs and provide the potential for such future developments.

Even now, favorable progress has been made in the immediate goal of finding a suitable property to lease so that the school can open its doors next fall. Please pray to St. Gregory the Great that God’s will be done in these matters and consider a one-time gift, or a monthly gift, to play your part in this exciting endeavor for classical education in the Catholic tradition.

After existing for nearly two decades under the sponsorship of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) as St. Gregory’s Academy, a group of teachers and alumni are in the process of re-founding the Academy in order to continue the good things it has provided its students. St. Gregory’s Academy, now to be called Gregory the Great Academy, has its roots in the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas (KU). The philosophy of the IHP provided the overall form within which a variety of other influences flourished.

The Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas began in 1970 and ran until the University shut it down in 1979. There were at that time a number of attempts to reinvigorate the Liberal Arts in the face of the institution decadence of the 1960s, but the IHP’s tone and vision were exceptional. Staffed by three professors, each with strong, yet complementary, personalities—John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick—the program sought not so much to return students to the basics of a time past, as to reawaken them to the ever-present wonders of reality. The motto of the program sums this up well: Nascantur in admiratione, let them be born in wonder.

IHP students not only read the great books—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—but also the good books—Mother Goose, Stevenson, and Dickens.  Not only did they spend time in the library, they also spent time gazing at the stars, learning ballroom dancing, and committing poetry to heart. This wholeness of approach reveals the uniqueness of the IHP: the professors realized that if the intellects of their students were truly to be born in wonder, it was not enough that they should read great books; first the depleted cultural soil of their lives had to be cultivated. Their approach was wildly successful judging by what is perennial in Western culture: about 400 of the students converted to the Catholic faith. Indeed, it was the large number of conversations that spelled the program’s doom.

Alan Hicks, the founding headmaster of St. Gregory’s Academy, was a graduate of the Integrated Humanities Program. As the dean of a small two-year college in St. Mary’s, Kansas, Mr. Hicks sought to implement the lessons he had learned at KU. It was at St. Mary’s that Mr. Hicks worked under Fr. Arnaud Devillers, a priest of the Society of Pius X, who would eventually join the newly formed Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. When in 1993, Fr. Devillers learned of an opportunity for the FSSP to open a boy’s boarding school near Scranton Pennsylvania, he chose Alan Hicks to be its first headmaster.

It was the genius of Alan Hicks to gather around him a faculty made up of strong but complementary personalities, much like the three professors of the IHP. To do this Mr. Hicks drew from the pool of IHP graduates, but he also cast his net into the currents of the small Liberal Arts colleges that had been founded around the time of the IHP: Thomas Aquinas College and Christendom College. After an initial honeymoon year, the personality of the Academy began to take definitive shape in 1994 with the arrival of Alan’s KU roommate, Howard Clark, and two graduates of Thomas Aquinas College, Luke Culley and Anthony Myers. Mr. Clark brought a strong teaching and Humanities background, while Mr. Culley and Mr. Myers greatly improved the extracurricular life of the school by the addition of a full sports program and the juggling troupe that would become something of a St. Gregory’s hallmark.

As the school grew, the vision of the IHP provided the keystone that creatively resolved the tensions of the many courses, personalities and extracurricular endeavors.  Yet with this growth also came a deepening of the IHP vision. While each of the three IHP professors was Catholic, the program itself, being under the jurisdiction of KU, was not. On the other hand, from its beginning St. Gregory’s Academy was a Catholic school with a daily Tridentine Latin mass and, for much of its life, the Divine Office as well. Thus, the sacramental life of the Church, or what Dom Jean Leclerq calls, “the poem of the liturgy,” became for the St. Gregory’s community an integrating and elevating principle which put new flesh on the poetic vision of the IHP, without, for all that, dissolving its bones.

Guided by this vision, Mr. Hicks and the faculty of St. Gregory’s Academy pursued an educational formation characterized by attention to the whole man; but above all, to the poetic praise of the Creator which is the perfection of all rational teaching and learning. St. Gregory’s sought to bring all the subjects of study within the compass of this vision. In teaching Science, for instance, emphasis was given to the method and approach of Natural History. This approach aims at an appreciation and admiration of the natural world rather than, as do most Science courses, its control.

In the same way, the Latin course at St. Gregory’s was taught according to the Direct or Nature Method. Here, as with the natural world, the object of study was approached with respect for what it truly is, rather than with an eye to its seeming mastery by confining it within the limits of a predatory rationality. Thus, since Latin is a language, and language is first a spoken and heard phenomenon that is assimilated as it unfolds within the dramatic story of our lives, Latin was presented to the students in that way. Contrasted to this is the standard, although not traditional, method of Latin instruction in which the language is reduced to the spatial world of a text, and the text presented for decoding with aid of a dictionary.

Leaving aside the celebration of the liturgy, St. Gregory’s Academy was never more fully itself than when all of its students, teachers, families and friends gathered together for a banquet. It was then that the school’s poetic vision was most fully incarnated. But truly, there is no need to leave the liturgy aside because the banquets were always the tributary and reflection of the liturgy. They were always held to commemorate some feast day, whether Christmas, the Immaculate Conception, or the feast of St. Gregory himself, and they inevitably followed the celebration of a sung high mass.

St. John Chrysostom says, “where charity rejoices, there is festivity.” For the average boy, charity is always something of a challenge. Yet when gathered at a banquet in their Sunday best, eyes shining with laughter in the candlelight, each remembering with advantages his exploits on the rugby pitch, and seconding his friend’s account of the same, even boys can rejoice in charity. And when they rise up as a group to sing, with voices straining, breaking, or even harmonizing, it can sometimes seem that they have reached something divine.

The life of an institution, like the lives of the men that make it up, is punctuated by crises. These crises mark the stages of the institutions growth and development, but they also signal something of a break with its prior life. At the age of nineteen St. Gregory’s Academy left its home in Elmhurst, and set out to make a new life for itself. But no life is completely new; and although St. Gregory’s has taken on a new name—Gregory the Great Academy—its patron and its vision remain the same. True development is known by this sign: that as a thing matures it becomes—in a wonderful way—more fully itself.