Kelsey Reinhardt, a Gillette, Wyoming, native and CatholicVote’s CEO, delivered a stirring commencement speech May 18 at Wyoming Catholic College, urging graduates to live their faith boldly, embrace their vocations, live out the Catholic moment in the U.S., and allow their experiences in Wyoming to shape the rest of their lives.
Fr. Deacon Kyle Washut introduced Reinhardt, highlighting her work in Catholic media, her nine years of discernment with the Dominican Sisters, and the recent birth of her and her husband’s first child. He also presented her with “the highest honor” of the college, a black Stetson hat, which Reinhardt wore during her speech.
Reinhardt reflected in her speech on each component of the institution’s name, beginning with Wyoming — which she described as “the greatest state in the contiguous forty-eight, and quite possibly in all fifty.” She encouraged the graduates to be guided by the memories and formation they received in Wyoming, a land that by its nature had shaped their character.
“History and memory can be a better teacher than abstract philosophy and certainly is stronger than moral platitudes,” Reinhardt said. “So instead, I beg you to entrust your time here to memory. Preserve it carefully. Let your history here become the teacher that shows you how to apply your philosophy of life when life becomes harder, faster, stranger, and less sheltered than it has been here.”
The rugged land of Wyoming
Reinhardt emphasized the bond experienced between a land and the people who inhabit it. She said that during the years she spent discerning with the Dominican Sisters, she often recalled St. Dominic and “how a rugged, red, desert-like land can form a missionary heart.”
“It can carve silence into a soul. It can teach austerity. It can make stillness vast enough to awaken zeal,” she said. “It can give a man the contemplative quiet to hear God and the missionary fire to go to the ends of the earth and proclaim Jesus Christ.”
She pointed to the example of St. Dominic, who was from Caleruega, in the province of Burgos, Spain, “with all the chivalry and sternness, the austerity and generosity, that such a land and people could produce.”
Similarly, Wyoming has given an enormous gift to the graduates, according to Reinhardt.
She praised the land’s “stunning expanses, its majestic views, the grandeur of the Grand Tetons, the valleys nestled beneath them, the faithful and strangely singular geysers to your north, and the rivers that write their stories in prairie and pebble and give life to the wild things around them.”
Reinhardt also reflected on the lessons students learned in the openness of the Western plains, such as through horseback riding, which is a part of Wyoming Catholic College’s core curriculum.
“You have ridden horseback across plains that acquaint you with limitation and call you to community, while also preparing you for isolation and hardship,” she said. “You have learned, not abstractly but bodily, that freedom is not the absence of limits. Freedom is the habit of moving well within reality.”
She encouraged the graduates to be guided by the memories they’ve made, recalling “the stars unfettered by light pollution,” the crisp autumn air, early snow days and lengthy winters, “the daring heights of mountain vistas,” and camping trips in scorching summer heat.
“Take also the discipline Wyoming gave you,” she urged them. “Take the knowledge that not everything worth having is convenient. Take the reflex to help your neighbor without making a speech about it. Take the capacity to endure weather, silence, distance, and discomfort. In an age increasingly engineered to spare us from friction, you have received the gift of friction. Do not cease to remember it.”
The ‘Catholic moment’ and vocation: ‘Dare to say yes’
Turning to the graduates’ Catholic identity, Reinhardt spoke of the unmistakable “Catholic moment” the Church has stepped into in the U.S.
“Conversions among young people are rising,” she said. “The clarity of magisterial teaching, the sweeping mysticism of the liturgy, and the boldness of a life anchored in meaning and tethered to truth have spoken to many of your fellow pilgrims and to you.”
Reinhardt observed that the Church’s universality providentially allows for a diversity of ways to live out the Faith, “in culture, in custom, in prayer, and in liturgy and in many lands.”
She spoke about her experience several years ago founding an Arabic Catholic news agency in Erbil, Iraq, where she witnessed how the lands shape a people and visited an ancient monastery carved into Mount Alfaf, near Mosul.
“Its very stones bear witness to a Christianity that had to learn how to endure invasion, terror, and siege: tunnels sprout forth behind it and around it into the mountains so the monks could evade Muslim invaders,” she said. “The Middle East is a Church of martyrs, built on martyred apostles.” She reflected on how in 2014, during the rise of ISIS, the terrorists forced Christian households to flee, pay tribute, or face death. She detailed the suffering endured by the Dominican Sisters in Mosul, who were forced into exile and how many of them suffered and even died as they were deprived of key medicines.
For the graduates in Wyoming, living out the faith looks different, Reinhardt continued, saying, “yours is not chiefly the Church of apostolic martyrdom, but of apostolic mission.”
“Your enemies will usually not mark your doors with a letter and give you 24 hours to flee. They will do something more subtle,” she said. “They will tempt you to forget who you are. They will ask you to trade your inheritance for comfort, your doctrine for acceptance, your vocation for drift, your liturgy for entertainment, your courage for approval.”
Yet, the current generation also has access to top catechetical material and “the freedom to move past the unmoored, oversexualized nihilism deranging the West,” Reinhardt said.
She urged the graduates to allow their formation, faith, and mission to help them “live differently for Christ,” most especially by “embracing vocation.”
“The faith you embody is built for fruitfulness across generations,” she said.
She encouraged them to say yes to the Lord’s call, whether to marriage, or religious life, without fear. She described marriage as not merely a “me and you, here and now” relationship but as a “call to build the Kingdom by ruling your own house in charity, fidelity, sacrifice, and joy.”
Renewing the Church and society has roots in family life, she said. Others, she noted, are called to be priests, monks, nuns, and religious brothers and sisters, living out the evangelical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as Christ did.
“Nothing is more satisfying than anticipating Heaven on earth,” Reinhardt said. “Nothing is more motivating than spousal closeness with Love Incarnate. Nothing is more fruitful than sacrificing even the great gift of children for the sowing and reaping of the harvest. Trust me: I know. I have done both.”
She urged those considering a religious vocation to boldly discern and embrace God’s call.
“To those of you fed on Catholic faith who feel this glimmer of shining light in your soul: the world needs you as much as it needs the Middle Eastern martyr,” she said. “It has often been said that the advance of the Kingdom comes through monks or, in their absence, martyrs. I would add a third ‘M’: mothers and fathers.
“Dare to say yes. Dare to offer your life as a living liturgy, a sacrifice pleasing to God, capable of transforming the ordinary, effecting the ‘marvelous exchange,’ and thinning the mystical veil between heaven and earth. The Catholic moment is here. Respond to its call with all the generosity your faith gives you.”
Continuing intellectual pursuits post-college: ‘Do not stop stretching’
Reinhardt encouraged the graduates to intentionally build community post-college and to continue seeking intellectual growth. She advised them to “not assume it will simply appear,” noting they will need to cultivate it themselves.
The intellectual formation they have received at the college will be crucial for stepping into the workforce and family life especially as artificial intelligence poses new challenges, Reinhardt explained.
“Here on the last frontier, you have sharpened within yourselves the discernment essential for survival in the age of the unbridled frontier of artificial intelligence,” she said.
They have learned many lessons through reading Jane Austen, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and even the warnings within Nietzsche's writings; and ultimately, they have learned “that the intellect is ordered most earnestly and most properly to the beatific vision, and therefore that it is infinite in its desire to know the Infinite, despite our finite abilities,” Reinhardt continued. “And so, you have made yourself a capacity — and stretched it further still — that God, who is a torrent, will fill. Do not stop stretching.”
This is especially crucial in a world where machines can mitigate much friction in daily life and mimic genuine intellectual efforts, she explained. But the danger, she said, is not that AI will simply “replace tasks,” but that “it will tempt human beings to become less human: to outsource attention, memory, judgment, friendship, study, prayer, and even perhaps conscience.”
Wyoming Catholic College has formed the graduates to not compete with AI “at machine-like speed,” Reinhardt said, but “to be more fully human,” by teaching them how to ask questions, pose disagreements with integrity, and to read thoroughly.
“The world will reward many shallow efficiencies. It will ask you to be optimized, frictionless, branded, available, entertained, and useful,” she said. “Resist the parts of that bargain that shrink the soul. Be competent, yes. Work hard. Learn new tools. And do not become quaint or technologically helpless. But this pedagogy has taught you never to confuse tool mastery with wisdom.”
She urged the graduates “to become builders” using the education they have received, extolling them: build marriages, families, schools, parishes, businesses, farms, newspapers, monasteries, and friendships.
“Builders of a culture that is sane enough to know nature, humble enough to receive grace, and brave enough to tell the truth,” she said.
As they leave the college, she urged them to not leave behind the faith, the state, or the education, but to carry them.
“As you leave Wyoming Catholic College, do not leave behind Wyoming, certainly not Catholicism, or what you learned in college; carry them forward in memory and practice," she said.
She encouraged the graduates to trust in God’s providence as they go forward, whether that is toward marriage, priesthood, or consecrated religious life. She told them to defend those in need, to pray even when no one can see it, and to build up civilization.
“And when the world becomes loud, remember the Wyoming stars,” she concluded. “When it becomes soft, remember the wind. When it becomes false, remember the truth you sought here. When it becomes barren, remember the Church, whose fruitfulness springs from the Cross. When it becomes dark, remember that heaven and earth are not so far apart as the world imagines.
“Dear graduates, congratulations. The Catholic moment is here. Your moment is here. Receive it with joy, seriousness, and courage. And do not stop stretching your soul to the Infinite.”