My bet is that you know many people who stopped practicing the faith after graduating high school.

There's a simple reason this happens: most of those friends never had a true understanding of the faith to begin with. A recent Pew Research poll found that only 33% of church-going Catholics in North America believe that Jesus Christ is truly present in the Eucharist. Elementary prep and high school religion classes, as valuable as they are, are not enough.

More young people walk away from their faith during the university years than at any other time. The number one reason they give: great difficulty reconciling religion with science.

At CPC, we see that difficulty as an opportunity. Our students are making some of the most important decisions of their lives — decisions that will shape not only themselves but the world around them. They will be the next doctors and nurses, lawyers and educators, scientists and programmers. And perhaps more importantly: mothers, fathers, priests, and religious.

It is crucial that they have a firm grasp of their faith. It is crucial that they live it boldly.

Imagine a university experience where students earn their degree while receiving solid formation in the Catholic faith, surrounded by an amazing Catholic community. That's exactly what CPC offers — and it's what your giving makes possible.

CPC students earn a fully accredited degree at Trinity Western University while taking Catholic formation courses that count toward that degree. They receive the sacraments together. They study, dance, pray, and eat together. They encounter faithful professors who take both their faith and their intellect seriously.

None of this happens without a stable financial foundation. Monthly giving is categorically different from a one-time gift. It's what allows CPC to plan — to commit to faculty, to sustain the chaplaincy, to say yes to the next student who walks through the door. $50/month from 500 donors is $300,000/year. That's not a budget line. That's a foundation.

Our mission is to provide solid formation and community so that every Catholic student can engage our times fearlessly and faithfully. To do that, we need your support.

GIVE50 is our campaign to find 500 people who believe in that mission. What does that look like? We're asking three things: give $50/month to provide greater financial stability, pray for our students and faculty, and spread the word — helping young Catholics in your life find their way to CPC.

Financial stability, prayer, and word of mouth. Those three things together are what allow CPC to grow, to serve more students, and eventually to pursue the capital campaigns that will give this mission a permanent home.

We're at 76 donors today. Every person who joins brings us one step closer. Your $50/month is not a small thing — multiply it by 500, and it changes what CPC can do, for the students in our classrooms today and for the ones who haven't yet found their way to us.

Here's a question worth sitting with: how many of the young people your parish forms through high school do you think are still practicing the faith at 25?

For most parishes, the honest answer is uncomfortable. And the reason is simple: parish formation stops at Grade 12. Then university happens — four years without a Catholic community, without faithful professors, without the sacraments close at hand. A recent Pew Research poll found that only 33% of church-going Catholics in North America believe that Jesus Christ is truly present in the Eucharist. That's not a failure of individual faith. It's a formation gap — and it opens widest during the university years.

PARISH100 is not a new initiative. It is a natural extension of what your parish already does. You've invested in your young people their entire lives. CPC is where some of them can go and not lose their faith when they get to university — where the formation your parish began can be carried forward.

The ask is straightforward: $100/month — $1,200/year — tax-receipted, reviewed annually at your finance council's discretion.

That's less than what a single family gives on an average Sunday. And yet at scale — 100 parishes each giving $100/month — it becomes $120,000/year in stable, recurring mission funding. That's not a donation. That's a foundation.

What makes parish giving different from individual giving is its institutional nature. Parishes budget deliberately. They renew annually. That rhythm creates exactly the kind of multi-year predictability that allows CPC to plan its future, not just its present — to commit to faculty, to sustain the chaplaincy, to say yes to the next student who walks through the door.

The students CPC forms don't stay in Langley. They graduate and return to communities across Western Canada — to parishes like yours. The formation you invest in follows them home.

And there's a broader reason to give, even if none of your young people are currently heading to CPC. The Church in Western Canada is not simply a collection of individual parishes, each responsible only for its own. The future of the Church here will be formed by young Catholics from across the country — and Catholic Pacific College is one of the only post-secondary institutions of its kind offering serious Catholic formation at this critical undergraduate moment. When your parish supports CPC, you are investing in the priests who will serve your diocese, the parents who will raise the next generation of Catholics, the teachers and doctors and lawyers who will carry the faith into the world. The Church in Western Canada needs CPC to succeed — and that means every parish has a stake in it.

The vision is 100 parishes across Western Canada — from British Columbia to Alberta — each giving $100/month. Together, that's the financial foundation a college needs to grow: more students, more faculty, deeper formation. And the institutional stability that opens the door to capital campaigns — a permanent campus, endowed chairs, scholarships that make Catholic higher education accessible to every young person in the region, regardless of means.

This is a founding moment. The parishes that join PARISH100 early are not simply donors — they are co-builders of a new chapter in Catholic education in Western Canada. When CPC is larger, when its campus is established, when its graduates are leading Catholic communities across the region, these will be the parishes that helped make it possible.