A Catholic Institute For Students of All Faiths

The Erasmus Collegiate Institute was founded to explore the intellectual tradition of the West formed through the Catholic sensibilities of imagination and reason intricately at work in the human person created in God’s image.

In the words of Peter Sampo, “The curriculum takes its cue from Catholicism in the sense that it has time for discussing only the most significant human experiences: pilgrimage, suffering, community, death and resurrection, to list a few. Indeed, the curriculum prefigures fundamental experiences that students will undergo throughout their lives…. God calls us His ‘image and likeness’….The kind of education that helps free a person to answer this call has traditionally been called liberal. It embodies the type of learning started in college but meant to be completed in the world--it is the work of a life. It is also the kind of education that causes joy to well up in the soul of the student because the soul recognizes and approves the inner transforming growth that takes place through learning.”

With this understanding, The Erasmus Institute’s Catholic identity assumes its character from a Catholic world-view that informs an understanding of education and of substance of the human person. The institute understands the classroom to be the epicenter of activity, where all students are called to true learning: the contemplation of the meaning and destiny of their lives through a critical examination of the Western tradition.