Benedictine College

Started as progressive, but since 2004, it has become **a center of the trad Catholic movement. ** Benedictine College was formed in 1971, out of the merger of two earlier Catholic liberal arts colleges in the area: St. Benedict’s College, a men’s college run by St. Benedict’s Abbey, and Mount St. Scholastica College, a women’s college run by Benedictine nuns. Mount St. Scholastica, a convent founded in 1863, is arguably on the other side of the Catholic culture war from the trad Catholics. These are modern, and one might even say progressive, nuns. The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica are in some ways the very things that trad Catholics like Butker fear. So how did an institution founded by these sisters end up as a base of the “other side”? The answer begins with the college’s current president, Stephen D. Minnis. Over the past two decades, Benedictine College has become a center of the trad Catholic movement. Earlier in the month, before Butker’s speech, Benedictine College featured prominently in an Associated Press story on the rise of traditionalists in Catholicism. Previously, he was a corporate lawyer, and he remained active at his alma mater as president of the alumni association. But his qualifications to head Benedictine were neither academic nor professional. Long before his hire, Minnis was active in traditionalist Catholic groups and had cultivated relationships with major conservative activists—including Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, the massively influential conservative donor and legal activist who was Benedictine College’s commencement speaker last year.