Image by Ben Collins on Unsplash
CV NEWS FEED // John Paul the Great University, a Catholic university that specializes in creative arts, is launching an expansion to fund its Creative Arts Academic Complex.
John Paul the Great University, a Southern California college the Newman Guide has recommended, is “a unique community of artists and innovators, centered around our faith in Jesus Christ and the beauty of the Catholic faith,” according to its website. The college strives “to create a campus environment where students grow in their relationship with Christ through Sacred Scripture, the Sacraments, and the Magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church.”
The school is seeking to raise $750,000 to cover the final costs of furniture and equipment for the new complex, according to a press release.
The school currently has 273 students, but its $18 million expansion project “aims to more than double the school’s academic footprint, an article in Angelus News states.
In 2006, Irish immigrant Dr. Derry Connolly founded the school after he visited Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio with his daughter, the article noted.
“A few moments in the school’s adoration chapel changed his life,” the article explained.
As he witnessed the number of devout young Catholics at Franciscan, the article continued, “he felt he was being called by God to do something with what he saw as an untapped spiritual natural resource.”
Connolly drew inspiration from Pope Saint John Paul II’s message at the 1992 World Communications Day.
The Pope exhorted the media to share the Gospel:
The Christian response to evil is, above all, to harken to the Good News and to make God’s message of salvation in Jesus Christ ever more present. Christians have a ‘good news’ to tell. We have Christ’s message — and it is our joy to share it with every man and woman of good will who is prepared to listen.
Thus, John Paul the Great University was dedicated to “be a place where young creative men and women could hone their skills and learn new ones, in all the major disciplines of media arts, directing, acting, cinematography, animation, screenwriting,” according to Angelus News. The school aims to send students forth into mainstream culture to “give the culture what it lacked — voices coming from a theological and philosophical viewpoint centered on Christ.”
According to the article, Connolly summarized the school’s mission by recalling the words of a young graduate who majored in cinematography: “She said she came to JP the Great for Jesus first, and cinematography second.”
