For the academic year 2024-2025, the Château Saint André Center partnered with Snow College, located in Utah, USA, to offer an intensive study-abroad opportunity for its students.
An innovative model was used in which the 9-day study-abroad seminar was nested into regular semester-long undergraduate course on bioethics, directed by Snow College Professor Dr. Gregory Wright. Dr. Wright and Chateau Saint Andre Center president Dr. Welie cooperated closely over many months to restructure the existing course such that the seminar abroad was fully integrated into the course.
14 Snow students accompanied by course director Dr. Wright as well as three other Snow professors, travelled to Rome at the start of their 2025 Spring break, where they were joined by Dr. Jos Welie as well as co-seminar-director Dr. Sander Welie, a health lawer and psychologist from The Netherlands.
The first half of the week in Italy was spent in downtown Rome itself. The Snow students had an opportunity to meet the international participants in the 2025 end-of-life care ethics seminar offered by the St. André International Center for Ethics and Integrity. They also attended a large part of the Annual Conference of the Pontical Academy for Life, the Vatican’s advisory international board on bioethical issues. In addition, they visited a number of cultural sites in Rome with direct relevance to the theme of their course.
The second half of the week was spent in the Villa Palazzola, a former abbey located an hour south of Rome. The beauty and peacefulness of this ancient site enabled reflection on the many impressions and insights gained during the first week, and a critical discussion of their relevance for the respective group projects. Students also had an opportunity to visit the gardens of Castelgandolfo, the summer residence of the popes, where a new center on ecology has been established during Pope Francis’s pontificate.
Upon return to campus, students continued working on their group projects, with formal presentations happening towards the end of the semester at the annual conference of the Utah Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters. All groups earned kudos from the judges, and one of the four Snow teams actually was judged to be the top student presentation of the 2025 conference.