10 Kelsey Reinhardt Quotes: How St. Benedict Can Transform Culture in America

Kelsey Reinhardt, President and CEO of Catholic Vote and co-founder of Zeale, gave the keynote address during the 2026 Academic Convocation at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.  Reinhardt is a Catholic media executive with a background in the Church, journalism, media, and public life  that enables her to integrate theological insights, global advocacy, and innovative communication strategies into Catholic Vote’s unique and wide-ranging mission.

Watch her speech here or scroll down.  Here are 10 quotes from her presentation.

Starved of Mystery

“Something in the air has failed to satisfy. Maybe it’s social media. We find ourselves claustrophobic: unable to see above the trees, unable to gaze upon the stars, unable to see around the bend or past the minute we are in. We are a civilization starved of mystery and missing mountaintops — flattened by the mundane and the inane. “

Mountains Within

“Now I have said that Benedict’s soul was like a mountain. There is also a mountain within you. As our Lord himself said — and as my best friend repeats to her children each night as she tucks them in and makes a cross over their hearts — ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.’ Do not be afraid. Do not forget to climb this mountain when all around you is flat and dreary.”

St. Scholastica’s Love

“On Monte Cassino I took a turn down the steps to kneel at the resting place of beloved brother and sister saints, St. Benedict and St. Scholastica. … You know the story: her brother, wanted to return home out of obedience to the monastery rule and she knew she would die soon and wanted one last night of the original DM: deep and meaningful conversation on the highest things. St. Scholastica knelt her head in prayer and a wild storm began at her loving request: bolts of lightning, sideways rain, thunder approaching the doorstep. Monte Cassino is a mountaintop so fresh and so full of breath that my soul and body knelt to weep at her tomb. She had never forgotten the greatest mystery: Saint Scholastica moved the mountain that was her brother’s pious soul with love.”

Small Things Matter

“Jesus, in his infinite wisdom, chose the example of the mustard seed. It is to teach us that we should never confuse size with importance. Never despise the one Hail Mary, the one heroic minute, the one smile or glance or gesture of friendliness in this vast sea of humanity on campus and off campus.”

The Way Up

“Love, like light, grows as you give it away. The smallest beam puts darkness to flight. “The light came into the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” We are swallowed in our own darkness at times — in our insignificance, frustrated in our pursuit of the heights, of good grades and good looks and good deeds and good things. But know, my friends: here is another reason Jesus gave us the example of the mustard seed: meekness: the way up is the way down.”

The Ordinary Rule

“Benedict had the genius of the kind of common sense that is born from Christian charity. His Rule is not merely a masterpiece of spiritual literature. It is something rarer: a set of directives so practical, so proportionate, so imbued with charity and hard wisdom about the human person, that it could actually be lived. Day after day. Year after year. By ordinary people. Now the results were anything but ordinary.”

Secret to Civilization

Ora et Labora, prayer and work, “are the secret architecture of the most remarkable civilizational achievement in human history. Benedict understood what that the world, in its cleverness, perpetually forgets: prayer and work are not opposites. They are not two competing demands pulling the soul in different directions. They are two faces of the same reality — each enriching the other, each giving the other its depth.”

Prayer That Works

“Prayer, in the Benedictine tradition, is not passive. It is not the erasure of thought or the paralysis of the inner life that characterizes Eastern religions. Benedict’s prayer is active. It is an act. It is the soul reaching upward with full intention, offering itself to God with all its faculties awake. Ora is a verb. Prayer does something. And Labora — work —  is, in turn, a form of prayer. For Benedict, work divorced from God is merely exhaustion. Work that is not offered upward, is a kind of spiritual poverty. The transformation happens in the intention.”

Christ’s Opportunity

“Christendom has collapsed. The cut flower still looks beautiful. But it has been severed from its root, and without that root it will not endure. But Christianity has not died. And each one of you has the opportunity to be a Benedictine monastery — wherever you are planted.”

Our Exciting Moment

“We mourn as though the future belongs to the enemy and is unavoidably dark. It is not. Every dark corner is a place waiting to be lit. Every crumbling institution is an invitation to build something true. I find this extraordinarily exciting.”

By Editorial Staff