Saint Mary MacKillop Colleges Albury

Saint Mary MacKillop College Albury is an independent school with a truly Catholic ethos. The School motto is Verum, Pulchrum et Bonum (Truth, Beauty and Goodness). Catholics believe that we live in a universe created by a loving God. Everything in the cosmos bears the stamp of the Creator – it is true, beautiful and good. Education is about encouraging our students to develop by seeking out truth, beauty and goodness. This will point them, ultimately, towards the God who created them. The School was founded in 2009 and caters for years Kinder to Year 12.While the school is independent from the Catholic Diocese of Wagga Wagga, it has a strong Catholic ethos with a religious education based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and an emphasis on the lives of the saints as role models.

This school has as its foundation Christ and His Revelation. Its entire motivation and final goal are to be found in the principles of the Gospel. A good school is one ordered to the authentic good of human persons. Each of our Catholic school students must be seen as a candidate for Heaven. Indeed, each must be seen as Christ in need: “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me..

Our children must feel loved as individual persons. They must be guided in the training of their freedom to freely seek what is true and good. The school must be seen as a place of Catholic formation, a place of prayer and work (including rigorous academic labour and cultural endeavour). This will include, primarily, a cultural atmosphere in which all the Christian virtues can be developed and intellectual knowledge personally and deeply imbibed – because although academic excellence is an important and necessary goal of the school, it is not sufficient.

The educational aim of the school is the critical communication of human culture and the total development
of the individual, according to a specifically Christian vision of reality. Here, absolute values, including the absolute value of the individual human person, are conveyed in a life-context, stimulating the pupils to exercise their intelligence and helping them to discern true and positive cultural factors from false and destructive ones, using the teaching of Christ as their yardstick. We aim:

• To provide pupils with the norms and procedures for rational thought.
• To present them with the Truth and with the methods they may use to arrive at and justify it.
• To teach them the critical skills needed for prudent judgement.
• To help them to know the teaching of the Gospel and to build it into their lives.
• To teach them the Christian way of life using Christ’s life as their model.
• To discern in the universe the God whom it reveals, and to take from the world around them all that is good and compatible with Christianity.

The specific role of the school is the Christian formation of its students. It exists to help them to take on the lifelong personal conversion which the Christian life entails, to encourage them to give themselves to God in prayer and reception of the Sacraments and to overcome selfish individualism and grow in all the virtues. They are helped to discover their specific vocation as the way in which they will do God’s Will and reach human fulfillment. This role is accomplished by an integration of Faith and Life which involves:

• The systematic and coherent teaching of the truths of Catholic doctrine.
• Instruction in the principles and doctrines of Christian morality.
• A special emphasis on the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues.
• Recognition and evaluation of the spiritual implications to be found in day-to-day situations.
• Class and school prayer – especially liturgical prayer.
• Opportunities for spiritual reading and silent, personal prayer, including Eucharistic adoration.
• Studies of the writings and lives of the saints.

We aim to help our students to realise that they are called to be living witnesses and apostles, and we give them opportunities for sharing their faith with others in the wider community and of giving service to the needy.