At Saint Isidore Catholic Student Center at Kansas State University, the faith is booming. Packed Masses, student conversions, and numerous Bible studies have all become commonplace in recent years. Many campuses around the country have been experiencing this same kind of renewed vitality, but the growth at Saint Isidore’s has also brought forth something entirely new.
In 2021, the student parish established the very first university affiliate of Catholic Rural Life in the organization’s 102-year history. While other affiliates serve entire dioceses, Kansas State’s affiliate is dedicated solely to the student body.
Kansas State, located in Manhattan, Kansas, is a very fitting location for the country’s first college affiliate. Kansas State is well-known for its strong agriculture program, and many of its students come from rural farming and ranching communities across Kansas and the Great Plains. This strong agricultural identity is reflected in the student center’s name – Saint Isidore, a 12th-Century Spanish layman and the patron saint of farmers.
Jim Schmidt, who has served as the affiliate’s advisor since 2024, explains that it came from the vision of the Catholic Students Center’s chaplain Fr. Gale Hammerschmidt.
“He said, ‘You know, we've got activities for Greek life within the Church. We've got activities for athletes within the university… But we didn't have anything for rural kids,” Schmidt says. “That's when Catholic Rule Life came to mind.”
Each month, the affiliate hosts up to four events that bring together rural life and the Catholic faith. These include talks from Catholic professors, service projects, farm Masses, and an especially popular tractor ride-and-drive event, in which students have the opportunity to leave campus and get a taste for life on the farm.
Just like Saint Isidore’s as a whole, the CRL affiliate is growing too. Schmidt notes that attendance at the farm Mass grew from around 50 in 2023 to 200 this past spring. This year's event, which was held on October 6, was bigger still, with over 300 attendees. For the first time, Mass and adoration were also followed by a night of country dancing.
As the affiliate continues to grow, so do the good fruits.
Schmidt explains that one of the main goals of the initiative is to bridge the gap between Catholic students from rural backgrounds and those from non-rural backgrounds. Fr. Hammerschmidt remarked, to Schmidt’s surprise, that students from urban and suburban backgrounds can have negative feelings toward the rural students, sometimes seeing them as “country bumpkins.”
Fr. Hammerschmidt, Schmidt says, “was searching for what [we can] do for the rural kids to help build them up.”
Part of bridging that gap is simply welcoming students to come and experience rural life for themselves. Isabel Preister, the Student Affiliate Chair who herself grew up on a farm in Nebraska, explains that the events offer a great opportunity for Kansas State’s young Catholics to better understand agriculture and the farmer’s way of life. Many of the attendees, she notes, have never been on a tractor or visited a farm.
“There's just so much joy in being out in God's creation without the noise of the city. There's just so much joy radiating off of us – and you can just feel it and see it in everybody’s smiling faces,” she says.
Above all, the affiliate offers rural students at Saint Isidore’s a space to be built up in their faith among students of a similar background. For Preister, not only has involvement in the affiliate provided led to great Catholic friendships, it has also helped equip her for the challenges that come with living the faith in a rural setting.
“Being back [home] my first summer… I just [didn’t have] the same pace in my life, being able to walk ten minutes to the chapel from college,” she says. “There are different ways I am going to have to change my lifestyle, if I’m going to be on a farm. …Ultimately [the affiliate has] helped me have faith that regardless of where I'm going to be in the future, I definitely can still have a strong faith life.”
The affiliate’s leaders hope their success is just the beginning of something bigger. This January, they’ll be traveling to San Antonio for SEEK – the Fellowship of Catholic University Students’ annual conference – in hopes of encouraging students from other colleges to learn from them and follow in their footsteps. They will set up a booth to connect with students and Newman Center leaders from across the country. Part of the challenge for leadership at Saint Isidore’s in establishing the CRL affiliate at Kansas State was that they had to start from scratch. Preister hopes their outreach to other college student centers will help make that process a lot smoother.
“They can just have our blueprint and make it their own,” she says.
They may have the blueprint, but the affiliate is still in its infancy.
“We haven’t perfected it,” says Schmidt, but he is enthusiastic about what the future holds for both his campus and campuses around the country. “I think Catholic Rural Life is sitting on an amazing opportunity that can have a generational impact well beyond what any of us can foresee.”
