Study at ITI · How We Study
The seminar table, not the lecture hall.
A dozen students, one great text, a professor who knows you by name. At ITI you do not sit through lectures about theology. You read the masters themselves and argue your way to understanding.
The Numbers Behind the Method
Small by design.
The Seminar Method
You are not an audience.
The seminar is the heart of the ITI, and the reason students come from twenty-two nations to a village south of Vienna. It is not a teaching technique. It is a different idea of what a university is.
Around One Table
A dozen students. No back rows.
Every class at ITI is a seminar of about a dozen students around one table. There is no lecture hall to disappear in: you prepare the text, you are asked what you think, and your question can change the direction of the hour.
With a 1:4 student-faculty ratio, professors know each student by name: how you read, where you struggle, what you are capable of. Education here is personal because it cannot be anything else.
Disputation
Real questions, argued to conclusions.
Seminar discussion is not opinion-sharing. You bring genuine questions, examine what is said by others, and learn to argue from principles to conclusions: the old discipline of disputation, practiced daily.
The goal is never to win. It is that the text opens, and that by the end of the hour twelve people understand more than any of them did alone.
“The ITI is not first a place. It is a community of people engaged in a certain activity, and its aim is the formation of a certain kind of person.” On the pedagogy of the ITI
Ad Fontes: To the Sources
You read the masters, not summaries of them.
Scripture, the Fathers of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas: page by page, in seminar, with time to think. Texts are carefully chosen from the greatest authors and saints of the tradition, from the Greek Fathers to the present age, so that theology breathes with both lungs of the Church, East and West.
Reading at ITI is treated as real intellectual work: slow, contemplative, repeated, “re-chewing” what has been taken in, as the monastic tradition puts it. Latin and Greek open the texts in their own words; philosophy trains the mind that reads them.
The Library
30,000 volumes, a few steps from the seminar room.
The ITI library in Schloss Trumau holds around 30,000 volumes, with theology and philosophy at its heart and significant sections in the social sciences, fine arts, Christian literature, and history.
The sources read in seminar stand on the open shelves: the works of the Church Fathers in the Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca, major commentaries on Holy Scripture such as the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and Herders Theologischer Kommentar, and the medieval and modern masters from Aquinas to de Lubac, Rahner, and Ratzinger.
The collection is organized by the Library of Congress system for easy browsing, and the historic Dominican collection, with titles in Hebrew and other languages, is still being catalogued, year by year.
One Connected Whole
Wisdom, not just information.
Latin and Greek, philosophy, Scripture, the Fathers, and St. Thomas are not separate subjects but one curriculum with one goal: theology received as wisdom. Each seminar builds on the others, so that the tradition stands before you as a whole, and you can think inside it.
What is studied in the morning is prayed at noon. Study is joined to sacramental life, shared meals, friendship, and the daily discipline of community: a formation of the whole person, for whom theology and sanctity, study and charity, virtue and gift all rise together.
Academic Quality, Sealed
Pontifical, and recognized by Austria.
This way of studying carries a seal: ITI is a pontifical institution, its degrees and its ecclesiastical faculty accredited by the Holy See through the Dicastery for Culture and Education, one of around seventy such institutions worldwide. Its degrees are additionally recognized by the State of Austria.
Recognition at a glance
- Founded By Pope St. John Paul II, in the living tradition of the Catholic Church
- Holy See Accredited by the Dicastery for Culture and Education; a pontifical ecclesiastical faculty
- Austria Degrees recognized by the State of Austria; the theology degree is recognized as the Magister theologiae
- Language All programs taught in English
- Method Small seminars, primary sources, close reading and discussion
- Recognized by The Newman Guide and the National Catholic Register's Catholic Identity College Guide; member of the University Conference of Lower Austria
Visit ITI in Trumau
Come and sit at the table.
No page can carry what a seminar carries. Come to Trumau, sit in on a class, and see whether this is the way you want to study.