The Curriculum

The College of St. Joseph the Worker forms students in the lay vocation. The lay vocation consists of three primary responsibilities: work, family, and the temporal order. Our curriculum is therefore designed to give the students what they need in order to achieve excellence in these aspects of the Church’s life. Students start with the “Core” curriculum of the first three quarters of study. This Core provides a skeleton of Church history and the Sacred Scriptures that is fleshed out with the knowledge gained in subsequent courses. By the end of a student’s studies, his body of knowledge will form an organic whole—a world-view—that, when combined with formation in the interior life of prayer and the sacramental life of the Church, will enable the student to fulfill his lay vocation and so find happiness.

Modeled on the Universities of Christendom

There are three types of courses.

Shop Courses

These are hands-on courses. The student will learn how things work and how to work on things.

Lectio Courses

Lectio is the source of the English word “lecture,” but it also means “reading.” Our lectio courses include both activities.

They follow the medieval tradition of a professor providing a close, nearly passage-by-passage reading of important texts. The students, therefore, read with the professor. They learn not only the content of the texts but also how to read.

Disputatio Courses

Disputatio is the source of the English word “disputation,” though the meaning isn’t quite the same.

In disputatio courses, the students engage with a variety of texts that present different viewpoints on particular problems, and they discuss them in a seminar setting. The objective is to find where these viewpoints can be reconciled and where they cannot, to determine what aspects of them can be integrated into the body of truth and which must be rejected and why.

At the medieval universities, lectio and disputatio were followed by meditatio and finally praedicatio. Meditatio is meditation. It is the prayerful thoughtfulness through which the truths of lectio and disputatio are internalized into the life of the virtuous person. The entire environment of the College of St. Joseph the Worker is aimed at cultivating meditatio as a necessary aspect of what it means to be a well-formed Catholic layperson. Praedicatio means preaching. The universities of Christendom were ordered always to the proclamation of the Gospel for the conversion of the world. The College of St. Joseph the Worker proudly follows this tradition. The praedicatio of the lay vocation is not the same as the preaching of the clerical vocation, but it is no less essential to the Church.

As the cleric makes Christ present in his preaching, so the laity make Christ present by sanctifying the temporal order. The temporal order includes: “personal and family values, culture, economic interests, the trades and professions, institutions of the political community, international relations, and so on” (AA 7). Lay praedicatio is, therefore, manifest most properly in action. The Church teaches that it is the laity’s job to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws, and structures of the community in which one lives. In other words, the laity is called to participate in sanctifying the world. The curriculum of the College of St. Joseph the Worker is ordered from top to bottom for this bold mission.