Gardone and Roman Forum Donation Appeal

Dear Friends,

We have a nearly full house for the 24th Annual Summer Symposium at Gardone, with application still open until March 31st. Unfortunately, we also have some very serious hurdles to overcome in order to offer our normal program.
As you know, the Roman Forum no longer has any endowment whatsoever, and now relies solely on donations for all of its activities. We are still $10,000 short of the $30,000 that we need to run the Summer Symposium. The money is used to pay for our twelve speakers’ participation (airfare, room and board), as well as scholarships for priests, seminarians, and students. We have nine more speakers to support, and a backlog of fifteen scholarship applicants.
We are planning to put all of our talks online from this summer forward, including a redoing of all twenty five years of the New York Church History Lecture Series, but we desperately need your help to be able to do so. I wish that I could think of new words to indicate what an enormous blessing the twenty four years of this Summer Symposium has been, not just for the people taking part in it, but for the broader work of building up scholarly contact and cooperation among Traditionalist Catholics and providing major texts in Church History and Social Thought. Our speakers now come from Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Sweden, and Australia in addition to the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Alas, I simply cannot think of anything else to say.
Fundraising is a very, very unpleasant work, and I promise that this, my second general request for help, will be my last appeal for help for this project. Quite frankly, I have a great fear that without your immediate assistance we may no longer be able to keep the Roman Forum going past this summer at all.

Warm regards,
John Rao (D.Phil., Oxford; Associate Professor of History, St. John’s University)
Chairman, Roman Forum