The Newman Guide

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How can you secure truly faithful Catholic education for your family?

Explore The Newman Guide!

  • Since 2007, The Cardinal Newman Society has recognized model Catholic colleges in The Newman Guide and has earned a trusted reputation for vigorously vetting Catholic colleges, ensuring they have strong policies and standards that uphold Catholic identity from academics and athletics to faculty hiring and campus life.
  • In 2023, we expanded The Newman Guide—which reaches more than 75,000 families online each year—to include faithful Catholic elementary, secondary, and graduate school options for Catholic families.
  • The Newman Guide helps Catholic parents and students find a pathway to a seamless faithful Catholic education, and it recognizes model institutions that refuse to compromise their Catholic mission.

While too many of America’s schools and colleges, including much of Catholic education, have become battlegrounds for today’s culture wars, causing as many as 85 percent of Catholic youth to lose their faith by adulthood—The Newman Guide is helping spur the renewal needed across Catholic education.

In 2009, Cardinal Newman Society founder and president Patrick Reilly presented Pope Benedict XVI with a copy of The Newman Guide and asked for his blessing on our work. Today, the entire Newman Guide is available for free online and reaches more than 75,000 families each year.

What should you look for in faithful Catholic education? Here are the key elements:

  • Salvation of Souls

    It’s about the sanctification and salvation of souls. Prioritizing the souls of students over every other consideration.

  • Catholic Community

    It’s about a joyful, Catholic community. Faithful educators partner with parents to give witness of a life based on Gospel values.

  • Prayer, Scripture and Sacrament

    It’s about providing students with living encounters with Christ. Not just learning Theology, but being continually fed by Christ through prayer, Scripture and the sacrament.

  • Integral Formation

    It’s about formation in mind, body and soul. It’s about forming students to resist relativism, overcome individualism, and discover vocations to serve God and others.

  • Christian Worldview

    It’s about imparting a “Christian vision of the world, of life, of culture, and of history.” Catholic education begins and ends with Christ.

Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Prayer

Experience the benefits of faithful Catholic education:

Explore schools, colleges and graduate programs recognized in The Newman Guide!

“Catholic education is above all a question of communicating Christ, of helping to form Christ in the lives of others…”

Every person has a special calling from God… a unique role in this life to serve God and others that no one else can fill.

As Catholics, we want to:

  • receive the grace to hear that calling;
  • respond to that calling with a resounding ‘yes,’
  • and joyfully live out that calling.

In a world full of distractions, confusing messages, and a lack of hope, it can be difficult for Catholic students to hear their particular calling. A truly Catholic education prioritizes the souls of students above all else.

Through a faithful Catholic education, students can be set up for success to lead holy and truly fulfilling lives by embracing their calling from God.

“God knows me and calls me by my name.… God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.”