What Civitas Dei Does
Advancing Catholic Culture in the World
Who We Are
Civitas Dei is a Catholic nonprofit organization uniting young Catholics to build intentional communities across America, advancing Catholic culture from the ground up.
We believe culture is downstream from community. Civitas Dei organizes young Catholics to lead the rebuilding of real, local, faith-rooted community.
Every person who joins a Civitas Dei township commits to two things: a shared spiritual life and a shared commitment to local economic life. Faith and work are the inseparable principles of the Catholic community.
Our Four Core Values
I. Authentically Catholic
We submit to the authority and doctrine of the Holy Catholic Church and promote excellence, living out the three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity and the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. We cultivate lives of prayer animated by Divine Intimacy, and Virtuous Excellence.
II. Community-based Network
Cultivating true community, by working and living integrated lives that are founded in faith, prayer, and business. Additionally, we connect Catholics nationwide (and beyond) to support mutual growth.
III. Local Impact
The goal of Civitas Dei is to order all our efforts and resources to the health and growth of our local townships. In this we seek to build and vitalize the cities and towns where our townships are present, directing all things to God through the little way of sanctification.
IV. Organic Culture
Fostering natural, steady, resilient Christ-centered culture permeating from our communities, animated by the Faith and prayer.
The Mission Fund
The Civitas Dei mission fund is how our nonprofit turns support from donors and from our own revenue-generating initiatives into real, visible community life on the ground. Every dollar in the mission fund goes toward one goal: building the Township.
This goal is realized in two ways:
1. Cultural and community life.
Before a town is beautified, it needs a reason for people to gather. The mission funds festivals, processions, parish fairs, and town dances, the ordinary, joyful rhythms that used to hold Catholic towns together and that modern American life has largely lost. This is the first and most immediate use of mission fund dollars in any community we build.
2. Physical beautification.
As a community’s cultural life takes root, the mission fund extends into restoring and beautifying the town itself, reviving classical architecture, caring for shared civic and sacred spaces, and making the physical town reflect the beauty of the life being lived in it.
The Township Model
Civitas Dei establishes communities called Townships in two distinct ways.
Integrated Townships
Integrated Townships give Catholics the capital, resources, and model they need to integrate into an existing town or city. Instead of Catholics quietly conforming to the surrounding secular culture, an Integrated Township works to bring Christ into an already-existing community.
Foundational Townships
Foundational Townships are built from the ground up, new Catholic settlements established through new development. This mode is for communities starting fresh: a new locality, built intentionally from its first building onward, organized entirely around Civitas Dei’s model of shared faith, fraternity, and local economic life.
Both modes serve a real, wholesome, faith-centred community life, which naturally builds an authentic culture.
Civitas Dei Events
Beyond the ongoing life of our Townships, Civitas Dei is committed to holding regular events designed to do one thing: inspire young people to take real action in their own communities.
The Result
When you support the Civitas Dei mission Fund, you are directly funding festivals, processions, fairs, and dances that slowly advance the culture of our local communities. Additionally, the funds go towards the restoration and beautification of our parish churches, Catholic-owned businesses and the literal infrastructure of the towns in which our communities live! Thus, building the spaces for Catholics to spiritually and economically thrive!
This is what it means to build the City of God, one community at a time.