Independent group sponsors speakers, film events and study sessions, incorporating Catholic thought on a secular campus
ANN ARBOR — For the last four years, the Kateri Institute for Catholic Studies has served as a home for faculty, staff and students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to incorporate the university's academic rigor into the rich, intellectual life of the Catholic Church.
The non-credit, voluntary program exposes U of M undergrads and faculty to Catholic intellectual thought, from St. Thomas More’s Utopia to St. Augustine’s Confessions, incorporating the Church's 2,000-year traditions into a modern university campus, explained Howard Bromberg, a clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan, who co-founded the institute with Scott Lyons, associate professor of English at the university.
“We were looking for a way to enliven the intellectual and academic studies at the University of Michigan from the perspective of a Catholic intellectual life and the Catholic intellectual tradition, which as you know, is incredibly rich,” Bromberg told Detroit Catholic.
Among the Kateri Institute's board of directors is Detroit Archbishop Emeritus Allen H. Vigneron.
The institute hosts a series of lectures on campus, delving into the works of St. Thomas More, Dante and St. Augustine, and hosts a regular film series, “Cinema Sanctus,” examining classic movies and exploring the timeless examples of truth, beauty and goodness that can be found in secular and religious films alike.
The institute is a separate 501c3 that operates independently from the University of Michigan, Lyons said.
The idea first came about after Lyons taught a class called “The Catholic Novel” on campus in 2019 and found a keen interest from both Catholic and non-Catholic students in the topic.
“We saw a huge vacuum in the curriculum for not only Christian thought, but for really any kind of metaphysical discussion or religious discussion at all,” Lyons said. “Materialism and a kind of postmodern discourse to study were unquestioned at the time. I thought that paradigm, because it was so dominant, really wasn’t serving us well. It didn’t answer a lot of questions.”
Bromberg and Lyons went about planning what would become the Kateri Institute for Catholic Studies, speaking with people in the Ann Arbor Catholic community, supporters of the Newman Center at St. Mary Student Parish in Ann Arbor and other professors and thinkers on campus as to what a Catholic institute on campus could look like.
“We came up with a lecture series at first that was called 'The Life of the Mind,' and we thought, ‘Well, we’ll see who shows up to this.' Maybe a donor will emerge, maybe people will come to this.”
The series featured four seminarians throughout the semester, delving into intellectual topics from a Catholic perspective. The events drew various audiences, but a solid core of 20-30 showed up to each event, forming a solid cohort of undergraduate students, graduate students, professors and guest lecturers.
Thomas Kitchen, a Newman Fellow at the Kateri Institute and a junior studying mechanical engineering, first heard about the institute through the Newman Center at St. Mary Student Parish.
“The Kateri Institute had an event on the Council of Nicaea, and it was so great to have intellectual engagement on Catholic topics, and get a different sense I don’t normally get through my university courses,” said Kitchen, whose family are parishioners at the National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica in Royal Oak.
Kitchen, who attended public schools growing up, knew his catechism and appreciated the fellowship and faith formation provided to him by the Newman Center at St. Mary’s Student Parish. But the Kateri Institute provided a supplement to the intellectual side of his faith.
“The Kateri Institute is specifically focused on bringing speakers to dig into the intellectual and theological topics, which is beyond the social events you see in a traditional campus ministry,” Kitchen said. “For example, this past semester we started a St. Augustine’s Confessions reading group. We are doing the same now this semester with Thomas More’s Utopia.”
The Kateri Institute hasn’t yet formalized a program for Newman Scholars to receive a formal certificate for their extracurricular studies — Bromberg and Lyons both admit the program is still very much in the early stages of formation — but already they have seen a small community develop from the institute's 300 or so participants.
“We’ve already heard from students who have participated in our program,” Bromberg said. “We’ve had conversions into the Catholic Church, though we don’t take the credit for it. But students have told us that they have broadened their intellectual perspective of the Catholic Church.
“University environments are not always hospitable to deep religious faith or intellectual inquiry from a religious perspective,” Bromberg added. “So, we provide that. Students have felt in some classrooms their beliefs and faith challenged or even ridiculed. So our kind of fellowship shows Catholics can be products of the Catholic intellectual tradition, that it’s as rigorous as any philosophical basis they might encounter.”
The Kateri Institute is affiliated with the In Lumine Network, a support network of various Catholic intellectual societies at non-Catholic colleges and universities, which supplies supportive resources, collaboration opportunities, speakers and access to best practices that helped the Kateri Institute establish itself on campus as an independent group.
Kitchen attests to the different worldviews and topics he’s had the chance to approach because the Kateri Institute has enriched his education.
“It delves into the faith from a classically liberal sort of sense that you don’t normally get on a college campus or even in your daily faith life,” Kitchen said. “It’d say it’s very valuable to be around people who are having that intellectual discussion about the faith.”
Beyond the lecture series, the Kateri Institute also publishes Transcendence, a literary magazine co-sponsored with St. Mary’s Student Parish, where students submit various essays, articles and poems.
“It’s not limited to Catholics or even Christians, although the vast majority of the work has been Catholics and Christians,” Lyons said.
Lyons said the Kateri Institute has faced a small amount of pushback in bringing Catholic or Catholic-adjacent programming to a secular campus, but the group is clear that it is a separate nonprofit and not formally part of the University of Michigan.
But most of the feedback has been positive, as those of all faiths show an intellectual curiosity in the Kateri Institute and the worldview it presents to the wider campus culture.
"There's a real hunger for these things," Lyons said. "And I think that the Kateri Institute's greatest success has been just providing programming that allows people to get their questions answered, or at least continue the discussion."
