Inspired by Pope St. John Paul II’s 1993 World Youth Day visit to Denver, the Augustine Institute was founded here in 2005 to form leaders for the new evangelization who understand, live and share their faith.
Its success in living that mission so well today makes it the nation’s largest Catholic graduate school of theology. Too, it is a leading provider of Catholic content, curriculum and digital resources. Having outgrown its building at the Denver Tech Center, the Augustine Institute is moving to a campus – near St. Louis, Missouri.
In an announcement made April 23, the institute confirmed that it bought the nearly 300-acre former Boeing Leadership Center in Florissant, Missouri.
“We weren’t looking for a property; this came out of the blue for us,” Tim Gray, Augustine Institute president, told the Denver Catholic.
Alerted by the St. Louis Archdiocese that the bucolic, state-of-the-art retreat facility was available for purchase, Augustine Institute officials discerned it was a good fit and quickly raised $50 million to buy it.
“We had a group of donors who stepped up and helped so we could pay for it in cash,” Gray said. “My head’s spinning. Five months ago, this was not on my radar at all. And now we’re moving to St. Louis.”
The site, overlooking the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, features 204 residential rooms, classrooms, conference rooms, dining facilities, fitness centers, a chateau and nature trails.
“It solved some of our growing challenges: number one, we don’t have student housing for the on-campus program,” Gray said. “It gives us a place for retreats and conferences, and it also expands what we need for our library, our chapel and for our general growth. We’ve maxed out our building here, so it was a unique opportunity we felt was from the Lord.”
The Augustine Institute aims to have its headquarters and graduate school moved in time for the fall 2024 semester. Other operations will transition over the next few years, officials said.
Denver Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila, in a statement, called the remarkable campus find “providential” and “the realization of a long-standing hope” of the Augustine Institute.
In 1993, Gray led a group of youths from the Diocese of Rapid City, South Dakota to Denver’s World Youth Day with his boss, then-Bishop Charles Chaput. Seeing the youths “catch fire” from that encounter with the pope and catechesis planted the seeds for the Augustine Institute. Gray co-founded the institute 12 years later.
“It’s astonishing how the Lord has grown the Augustine Institute over the last 19 years,” Gray said. “We started with a small handful of on-campus students. Now we have over 550 students in our graduate school.… We can’t fit into our own building to do our graduations.”
For nearly 20 years, the Augustine Institute has served the Church in Denver and across the world through formation, education and evangelization. With their move to Missouri, they hope to continue that mission in the decades to come. (Graphic provided)
Formed, the institute’s Catholic content platform available to families and parishes, boasts some 1.7 million subscribers and users. Its Amen prayer and Scripture app has some half-million users. Among other institute offerings are an apologetics course for high school students and a catechetical curriculum for youngsters.
“A hundred sixty-four thousand students are using our Word of Life curriculum. It’s been doubling every year the last couple of years,” Gray said. “We started as a little seed here, that little mustard seed grew into a great tree.”
“The Augustine Institute really could only have been born in Denver,” Christopher Blum, the institute’s provost, told the Denver Catholic. “Denver is an amazing place that has been touched by God’s providence with World Youth Day 1993 and the extraordinary work of three successive archbishops with sterling character and incredible commitment to the Gospel: Stafford, Chaput and Aquila.”
The two leaders expressed deep gratitude to the Denver Church for its support and called their impending move “bittersweet.”
“The local community really nourished and helped the Augustine Institute to grow and to be where we’re at and to have the ability now to have a greater national impact,” Gray said. “We’ve been able to partner and serve the Church through our digital media and platforms. This now gives us a physical platform that allows us to connect and serve the larger Church.”
Just as the apostles went out from Jerusalem to evangelize, he added, so too the Augustine Institute is going out from Denver to a site that will enable it to reach more people.
“We look at our time in Denver as nothing but gift,” Blum said. “We have over a hundred graduates of the MA program who are active in the apostolate here in northern Colorado. They are teachers and administrators in schools; they work in the diocese; they work in apostolates and in parishes. We’re not leaving these people behind; they’re part of our family. We’re going to invite Denver to Missouri.”
St. Louis Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski believes the Augustine Institute will transform their new property “into the premier center for the new evangelization in the United States.”
“By leveraging St. Louis’ central location,” he said in a statement, “the Augustine Institute can foster a new era of collaboration with Catholic organizations nationwide and invite more people to encounter Jesus Christ and his Church.”
Seeing the Front Range through the windows of the institute’s Denver site reminds Blum of Scriptural references to mountains “where the Lord spoke to his people.” Comparably, the view from a belvedere on the new property offers a commanding view of the two greatest rivers of North America, the Missouri and Mississippi.
“When we look out at these two rivers coming together, we see the geography of the evangelization of North America,” Blum said. “It’s also beautiful to see those great rivers because (Scripture says) the city of God is gladdened by the river that flows from it. We’re going to look at those rivers in a similar way that we look at the mountains now – as a summons to serve God.”