By DEXTER DUGGAN
ESCONDIDO, Calif. — As he talked about the latest plans for expansion at John Paul the Great Catholic University here, The Wanderer asked school president Derry Connolly, Ph.D., how much this would cost.
He flashed a big grin. “Probably a good question. Many million. . . . Our big challenge is buying real estate. While real estate is depressed, $10 million.”
The real estate would be much more expensive if it were right in the Pacific Ocean coastal city of Carlsbad, he said. However, San Diego County’s Escondido is over to the east, in California’s coastal hills.
Cost-conscious Connolly and his administrators know the value of a dollar, but they also trust in God to provide for the orthodox Catholic school that wants to help renew the culture.
“When you’re working for God, you never know where the money comes from. . . . We’re not a fund-raising machine,” Connolly said.
Having been inspired to start a new Catholic school focused on providing education in media and business here in southern California, down the coast from the media and business hub of Los Angeles-Hollywood, Connolly has become familiar with mapping and carrying out expansion plans.
JPCatholic opened in September 2006 with 30 students, in a portion of one San Diego business-park building, then moved to this suburban town north of the San Diego metropolitan area two years ago, occupying three structures and a recruitment office along Escondido’s downtown Grand Avenue.
Unlike the previous location, where only a parking lot was outside the front door, the school’s doors in Escondido open onto the daily life of shops, restaurants, and offices attracting pedestrians.
This fall, Connolly said during a July 2 interview, there should be more than 300 students. The growth has been steady but not overreachingly ambitious.
While he spoke in a nearby administrative building, a sign on the glass front door of the two-story main classroom structure cautioned entrants against making noise because filming was in progress. He explained that Pillars of Catholicism II was in production, a lecture series to examine the sacrifice of the Mass.
This follows JPCatholic’s Pillars of Catholicism, a 13-episode review of the catechism, released three years ago, that went global. It was made on the sound stage at the school’s previous location with three faculty members providing the commentary.
“A lot of people use it throughout the world for catechesis,” Connolly said, adding later in the interview, “We’ve given it away freely to anyone who wanted it. We made zero out of it, not a penny.”
Among four of JPCatholic’s students who worked on the original Pillars crew, he said, two have been ordained to the priesthood and two more are to be ordained.
While equipping clergy to be media-savvy, the school’s wider educational efforts address secular culture directly, from producing contemporary entertainment to video gaming.
“We do a very good job recruiting students. We don’t do a good job recruiting benefactors,” Connolly said, adding: “Put a big thing in The Wanderer saying, ‘We need benefactors’.”
Without another building, he said, there isn’t adequate classroom space in Escondido beyond 2016 for planned expansion.
As at the previous location, JPCatholic provides a chapel here with the Blessed Sacrament.
“The young people we get hunger for Catholic and American values. I hope they’ll be the force to restore values, focus on family and country and God,” he said.
Facebook is the best student-recruiting tool the school has, Connolly said.
Creativity And Innovation
Expansion plans include the creative arts and instruction in undergraduate theology and fashion design, he said. JPCatholic already teaches graduate-level theology.
Connolly pulled out a preliminary planning document for school expansion to show to The Wanderer.
It said: “JPCatholic is establishing a new and transformational School of the Creative Arts to inspire creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial thought in a collaborative environment at the intersections of the creative arts (film, gaming, and fashion) with business, design, and marketing.
“The School will focus on the synthesis of creativity, innovation, and conceptual thinking to empower the next generation of disruptive, creative, and innovative thought-leaders across a multitude of culture-impacting global industries,” the document continued.
It also said that from the outset, the school “has had the vision to graduate innovative and determined students, who know and love Jesus, and boldly proclaim His Gospel in culture-impacting fields. The UNESCO Creative Economy Report of 2013 begins with the statement that ‘the creative economy has become a powerful transformative force in the world today. It is one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy, not just in terms of income generation but also for job creation.’
“The report continues that globally, more and more of our ‘intellectual and creative resources are being invested in the culture-based industries, whose outputs are often intangible’,” the JPCatholic planning document said.
“ ‘Human creativity and innovation are the key drivers of these industries, and have become the true wealth of the 21st Century. Indirectly, culture increasingly underpins the ways in which people everywhere understand the world and see their place in it’.”
The influence in secular film schools, Connolly said, is to work on topics like LGBT issues, abandoning the arts, while JPCatholic takes a different approach.
“We’re not going to solve the whole universe’s problem, but we’re going to make a dent in the kids the Lord sends us,” he said.
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