A World in Need of Re-Enchantment: A New Leader at Wyoming Catholic College

WYC is an oasis of sanity in an increasingly insane world. Would that there were more like it, producing sane men and women to lead us back to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Julian Kwasniewski

We live in a world in need of re-enchantment; but re-enchanting love is rekindled in the hearts of people one at a time. To reclaim that sense of loving delight in God and the world, we need to give our students a break from the busyness and distraction that surrounds daily life, let them digitally detox, and let them have the time to look and see the goodness of the created world and have the freedom to delight in it.

A native of Wyoming, Professor Kyle Washut was recently appointed fourth president of Wyoming Catholic College, a four-year, liberal arts college in Lander, Wyoming. He kindly took some time to speak to me about Wyoming Catholic’s vision and the story of the school, and to relate a few anecdotes of the Wild West.

Julian Kwasniewski (JK): President Washut, you are a Wyoming native. Can you tell us about growing up in the Wild West? How do you think that has shaped your view of the word?

Kyle Washut (KW): I’m a third generation Wyoming native on my dad’s side. Growing up in Wyoming, I was always aware that there was something special about being a Wyoming native. There are more cows than people in the state, so the average American has a much better chance of eating a hamburger from Wyoming than of meeting a person from here. I was always pretty proud of being part of such a select group.

While I grew up in the “big city” of Casper (50,000 strong), much of the family on my mom’s side were ranchers, so I grew up familiar with and greatly respectful of the cowboy way of life even if I was always the city boy when visiting the cousins. (Some of my siblings devoted themselves to more full time cowboy pursuits; a brother went on to be a professional rodeo cowboy for a time. He’s still trying to improve the way I ride!) My relationships were nourished by sharing in the wild landscape of Wyoming: shooting and fishing with my grandfathers, camping and playing on ranches with my cousins, cross country skiing, canoeing, and rock-climbing with my friends. The “Wild West” was woven into the fabric of my life.

Above the door into my office I’ve mounted the antler’s from the first deer I killed. I spent the day with my dad hiking through the fresh early October snowfall on my aunt’s ranch, as she guided us to track and stalk a large buck. And, when it at last stood only fifty yards away on a little two-track road, I missed the shot, and had to chase it into the late evening. When I returned home exhausted, the work was not done. My grandfather was there to teach me how to butcher the animal out on the porch in the freezing cold. I keep the antlers in my office as a symbol of much of what Wyoming has given me: the bonds of friendship and family that were cemented in its wilderness, the traditions of my elders that were passed on to me here, and as a reminder that Wyoming’s wilds ares a place of testing that confront me with my shortcomings while calling me to persevere in the face of challenges and giving me the freedom to do so.

JK: You knew the founders of Wyoming Catholic College before there was any college. Can you describe your involvement in the school, and its early days?

KW: The church in Wyoming received a special call to renewal in the year 2000. Bishop Ricken had been personally ordained by St. John Paul II and was sent out to proclaim the new evangelization in the mission territory of the Diocese of Cheyenne. In a particular way Bishop Ricken felt his call was to form the youth of Wyoming, and I was blessed to travel with him on pilgrimage to World Youth Day in Rome that year. That same year, the future president of Wyoming Catholic College, Fr. Bob Cook was ordained to the priesthood. And both Bishop Ricken and Fr. Bob lived in Casper, at my parish, where they also met Dr. Bob Carlson.

First and foremost, then, I was the one of the privileged young men who received the direct ministry of Bishop Ricken as he extended the jubilee call of John Paul II to the Church in Wyoming. I was invited to join a small group with the three future founders of the College, where we read literature, ate great food, and discussed our life of faith. Out of this small group, the three founders started the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought in the mountains above Casper, and I served as the chief dishwasher for it. And it was there that the idea of Wyoming Catholic College was born. In my mind there is a clear line from John Paul II’s call to Bishop Ricken, to Bishop Ricken’s focus on the youth of Wyoming, to the formation of my collegiate small group, to the starting of Wyoming School of Catholic Thought, and ultimately, to the founding of Wyoming Catholic College.

JK: Wyoming Catholic College is under the patronage of “Our Lady Seat of Wisdom.” Was the Marian theme also there at the beginning?

Bishop Ricken was also convicted that he founded the college in response to a call of Our Lady. This is especially important in my own understanding of my role at the College. When I was on the pilgrimage with Bishop Ricken, I had an experience at prayer that convinced me that I was called in a special way to serve Our Lady here in Wyoming. At the time, I thought that would be as a priest. As it turns out, Our Lady had a different plan. She who had first inspired Bishop Ricken to start the College, also intended for me to make her mission for this College my own.

I first spent a summer continuing my role as founding grunt-worker of the College: painting walls, moving boxes and the rest. At one point, as I was painting the College offices, a woodpecker flew into the house and splattered fresh paint all over and I had to capture it and then clean up! In many ways, that is what that sums up what it was like during those very early days of founding the College: desperately trying to bring order in the face of various forces for chaos erupting around us! But from those early days I would go on to be the first Assistant Dean of Students, then a faculty member, then academic dean, and now the president. That Mary took me from dishwashing and chasing woodpeckers to now being president, seems to me a particularly fitting path of service to the work of the new evangelization in the wilds of Wyoming.

JK: What, then, is the essence of Wyoming Catholic? What makes it distinctive?

KW: Wyoming Catholic College, in a nutshell, is dedicated to transforming her students’ hearts and minds through their encounter, in love, with the God who is hidden and revealed in his creation. That encounter takes place in the wilderness and on horseback, but it also takes place through memorizing poetry, reading Great Books, in conversations with friends and professors in class and over lunch, and through our distinctive chaplaincy which offers both a Byzantine and a Roman liturgical schedule.

JK: Enkindling wonder and a sense of the world’s enchantment are often spoken of as goals at Wyoming Catholic. What does that mean?

We live in a world that has, to quote a modern ‘poet’, “lost that lovin’ feelin.” It is a world in need of re-enchantment; but re-enchanting love is rekindled in the hearts of people one at a time. It isn’t done on a mass scale, but rather in a small setting, with plenty of time. To reclaim that sense of loving delight in God and the world, we need to give our students a break from the busyness and distraction that surrounds daily life, let them digitally detox, and let them have the time to look and see the goodness of the created world and have the freedom to delight in it. That delight gives rise to the wonder and amazement which is at the root of any authentic intellectual inquiry. We study because we love, and once we come to better know what we love, we proclaim that loving knowledge to others: in song, in speeches, in reciting poetry together, in conversation. We ourselves become occasions for others to have that encounter, that poetic delight, and those philosophical conversations, and so the re-enchantment spreads. We re-evangelize the world through transforming our students.

When our students are transformed through poetic immersion and careful philosophical reflection, while also learning how to communicate and incarnate this education into their concrete lives, they are the inheritors of the incredible breadth of the Catholic intellectual tradition. The vision of the desert fathers and the Benedictine tradition focused on an immersive poetic encounter with God in the wilderness, and that encounter was presupposed by both the scholastic philosophers that founded the first universities and by the practically minded Jesuits who succeeded them.

The “Wyoming Catholic College difference” is best known, however, not in abstract theory, but in the concrete lives of our graduates. In the priests, the consecrated nuns, the missionaries serving on college campuses, on wilderness adventures, and in Malawi, in the incredible men and women who inspire oil companies to fast track them to be engineering leaders, or law schools to spend a day traveling to the middle of Wyoming for a chance to recruit them.

But I think it is also captured in stories of our students having high-tea on a mountain top while playing Bach, or praying the psalms while treading water in the icy Popo Agie River in commemoration of the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste (March 9), or reading Dante’s canto about the icy pit of hell as they lower themselves into an icy crevasse. Such glimpses into the life of a WCC student probably do more than any theory to tell just how remarkably distinctive we are. And they highlight that the students coming from here will continue to renew and re-evangelize the world.

Images courtesy of Wyoming Catholic College.