Carroll College’s Catholic Studies program has received a $3,727 grant from the Foundation for the Diocese of Helena through its Faith in Action Grants Program to support a contemplative student retreat, April 9–11, 2027. Developed in partnership with Campus Ministry, the retreat will offer students an opportunity to step away from the distractions of daily life and deepen their faith through prayer, reflection and meaningful conversation.
Carroll College's Catholic Studies program with Campus Ministry is exploring a new way to help students reconnect with truth in an age of distraction. A faculty proposal describes today's students as caught in a kind of spiritual desert: well-resourced but disoriented, shaped by consumer culture and technology into isolated pockets of "my truth," often lacking in the capacity to form real community with those around them.
The proposed response is a contemplative retreat for nine upper-division Catholic Studies majors, held over three days and two nights at the Sycamore Tree Retreat Center near Swan Lake, Montana. Funded by the Foundation for the Diocese of Helena, led by Fr. Tyler Frohlich and Dr. Eric Hall, and grounded in both the Liturgy of the Hours and daily Mass, the retreat would give students space for quiet reading, writing, and conversation, and cultivating a receptive intellect, namely, the capacity to truly see and receive the world as it is, rather than only argue about what we want it to be.
The goal is simple: help students rediscover reality itself, so they can, in turn, bear witness to the Truth at the heart of the Gospel.
