In the past year, Catholic Distance University has been the humble recipient of grants that support our mission to share joy from the truth in a digital world with more of the underserved Church.

CDU is thankful to The Our Sunday Visitor Institute, which supported the university’s initiative to update the website and make it truly mobile friendly. CDU is also grateful to The Koch Foundation for a grant to help support our mission diocese scholarship program that offers students serving mission dioceses a graduate education to share with others.

CDU has enrolled more than 1,350 incarcerated Catholics in Catholic continuing education since Easter. This success is due to the Holy Spirit and the incredible support of organizations that share our mission. Grants from the Order of Malta enabled CDU to explore and develop independent faith education courses on a digital platform to reach prisoners. Since the launch of our digital prison ministry, incarcerated enrollment has skyrocketed. With continued focus on our digital prison ministry, in addition to our correspondence prison course program, we estimate that CDU will reach more incarcerated Catholics in the next year than in all of our 35 years of prison service. The Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston awarded CDU a substantial grant to support service to prisoners and expand our digital platform. The Andreas Foundation and The John C. Fricano Foundation have also contributed funds for new digital course development on prison tablets. Thanks to their generosity, we will also develop digital prison courses in Spanish. We are grateful to these organizations for helping CDU to educate our brothers and sisters behind bars.

We are humbled and blessed to share our online education expertise and resources with the underserved Church. We are especially grateful because we could not fulfill our mission to serve without grant support, donations, and prayers from our friends.