Exclusive Interview with Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College's New President, Dr. Ryan Williams - #OLSWC

Catholic News World's exclusive interview of Dr. Ryan Williams the new president of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College in Barry's Bay, Ontario, Canada. He explains why you should attend this faithfully Catholic, liberal arts college. This college is featured in the Newman Guide of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College aims to make a truly Catholic post-secondary education accessible to all. Our tuition for the 2018-2019 academic year is only $7,463.20 (CAN $), and full room and board for the school year is $6,277.00 (CAN).

Below are some excerpts from the full Video (below) 

Interviewer:
Hello, welcome to Catholic News World,  we are here today in Barry's Bay Ontario,Canada welcoming the new president of  Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College. Dr. Williams, who will tell us a little bit  about our Lady Seat of Wisdom College  and why you should send your children  here.
Dr. Ryan Williams
Welcome, thank you very much and thank you for coming to visit us here, and to see what the college is all about  and so we can reach out to your audience  and your listeners. Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College is one of those hidden gems in North America. It's a  Catholic College faithful to the Magisterium. It's regarded as a quite a good school by the Newman Guide and some of the history is quite interesting. What happened about 20 years ago is, a  group of parents and professors who were  themselves parents got together and they realized that in this area and in  general education need needed a boost. It needed to focus on on things that are more appropriate to human flourishing and they realized that college prices were getting very high parents couldn't  afford to send their students to colleges that they wanted and the result of that was Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. At the time it was an academy but they got together they decided to form a school whose principals would be quite simple:  one it needed to be faithful to the  Catholic faith to the Magisterium, two it  needed to actually educate students, not  just train them for something and three  it needed to be affordable. So that  anybody who wanted to get this kind of  education could do so. Now they took the name Our Lady Seat of Wisdom because  they felt a special  devotion to Our Lady Our Lady of  Combermere there's the Madonna house  which is such a very strong influence on the community they felt very called to ask our Lady for guidance in this and 20 years later they're still thriving and flourishing they've grown beyond the  state of an Academy  College and their focus is the the  liberal arts in their truest form.

Dr. Williams tells us about his family and education...
Well I was born in st. Louis but I immediately moved to Texas ... there I grew up a cradle Catholic. My  mother was always especially devoted to  Our Lady thanks to her mother I went to Catholic school Saints Peter and Paul and then the Catholic High School Saint  Anthony's and at the end of my 18 years there in Texas I moved on to Boston College. 

At Boston College I received bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in philosophy after that time I was approached by a  rector of a Seminary in Nairobi Kenya. They needed teachers and he asked me to spend some time down in Kenya helping them train young men for the priesthood. At the time Archbishop Jose Gomez was was the Archbishop of the diocese ... and I had  perhaps been discerning a vocation to  the priesthood so he sent me to Rome -  he accepted me into the seminary...
He sent me to Rome to study at  the North American College...
 I was actually  in the Holy Land which is a very prominent part of this story and I was  in the garden of Gethsemane and I was praying profoundly about what God might have me do and it was there that I  realized he was not calling me to the to the priesthood. He had called me to the seminary to sort of orient myself ... so I actually left the seminary and stayed in Rome to finish my my theology degree and while I was studying there in Rome I met who was going to be my future  wife. She was an American out of New York : Mariana my darling. She was working and studying and you know in Rome she was  getting her theology degree.  She was  working in the Vatican under Cardinal Shoka and we met we fell in love and  I proposed to her after a year of dating  and at that time she was still working  on a on a master's degree in theology  from the Angelicum. I had been  accepted to begin my doctoral studies in  philosophy at Catholic University of America so she stayed in Rome during the bulk of our engagement while I worked on  my doctoral program. ...We actually got married in St. Peter's Basilica at the altar of the Immaculate Conception it was a very special event ... (the Williams currently have four daughters)
About Sacraments at OLSW
Every week we have a community adoration half-hour it's on Friday; this year every day we meet at 3 p.m. Most of the students show up to do the the Divine Mercy chaplet every morning at 9:15, the staff gets together to pray for the  college. We have, as I mentioned, chaplains  ready to hear confession all you know every day we have again daily Mass, we do  pilgrimages and if you look at it almost every year we have not only  students that are getting engaged or  choosing to have children but we have at  least one student either going and you  know considering a vocation to the  priesthood or  to religious life...
(Images for this post provided by Mrs. Marianna Williams)
Support OLSW here: https://www.seatofwisdom.ca/support-old/ways/

Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College
18 Karol Wojtyla Square,
P.O. Box 249
Barry’s Bay, Ontario K0J 1B0
View on Google Maps

Phone

Phone: +1-613-756-3082
Fax: +1-613-756-4077
Toll-free: +1-877-369-6520
Email
info@seatofwisdom.ca

Watch the Entire Interview below and please SUBSCRIBE to CNW's Channel!