Graduate’s Documentary Celebrates College, Classmates & 20th Reunion

It has been a busy year for alumna reporter and producer Mary Rose (Bacani ’03) Valenti: In addition to producing several documentaries for Salt + Light Media, some of which featured fellow Thomas Aquinas College alumni, she traveled to California to join her classmates for their 20th reunion. Earlier this month, she took to Salt + Light’s blog to reflect on the experience — and to release a documentary about the visit.

“When I opened up the admissions brochure for Thomas Aquinas College, it was as if lightning struck me,” writes Mrs. Valenti, recalling how she first learned about the College some 24 years ago. “I fell in love.” The journalist compares this providential discovery to another, four years later: her introduction to Salt + Light, describing both as the “only two instances in my life where God’s call was undoubtedly clear.”

First as a full-time and now — in order to raise her four children — as a freelance producer, Mrs. Valenti has relied on her rich background in the liberal arts to keep her in good stead at Salt + Light. “I didn’t fully appreciate it then, but Thomas Aquinas College in California provided me with an incredible spiritual and intellectual foundation in my Catholic faith,” she says. “It provided me with a ‘bright lamp.’”

Mrs. Valenti has shone that lamp on various issues and apostolates through her work in Catholic television — including, recently, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel. Still more recently, she brought her class reunion to life in a short documentary profiling both her classmates and the college they were privileged to call their home.

“My education became an invaluable part of my life,” she writes. “I was excited to go to my college reunion in June of 2023 to rejoice in the gift of that education and to capture that joy through Salt + Light Media.”