Our Charisms

When you encounter Mary, this is who we are.

Pioneering Courage

Within us is an unshakable impulse to serve needs and awaken hearts, even if it means going beyond our realm of comfort, and even if it means doing what’s never been done. We listen for God’s call and we respond.

With the grit and the grace of our Founding Sisters and the early settlers of the Dakota prairie, we go ever forward with a confidence which is not our own, but which is granted to us by the Holy Spirit.

Warmth of Welcome

Shaped deeply by our Benedictine values and the agrarian, neighborly manner of the Dakotas, our hearts are tuned to a sense of genuine hospitality.

We strive in everything to create a “spirit of place” in which our guests feel welcome and our community feels at home. Interactions with us are never superficial or transactional. We “receive all as Christ.”

Apostolic Impulse

We are sure in who we are and restless in what we do. Attentive to the Holy Spirit, we sense our call to be a testing ground and laboratory of the New Evangelization, meeting people where they are and bringing them to an encounter with Truth.

Responding to a culture in crisis – which finds itself adrift, unsure, indifferent – we step forward with humble courage and quiet confidence.

Friendship with Truth

For us, the intellectual life is not a grim pursuit of academic merit but an adventure of personal encounter and loving exchange. Jesus Christ said He is the Truth… and we believe Him.

And so we relate to Him, to each other, and to our tasks of study and teaching and research in the manner of genuine friendship and mutual support. Moreover, in a world of loneliness and weary isolation, we know it is urgent to invite others into such a life; we are not exclusive or closed to the world beyond us.