The room was packed. It didn’t matter that it was 9:30 on a Sunday night. The students were hooked on the words of the slim priest with graying hair and glasses speaking at the front of the room.
Suddenly, he pulled out a large power drill and slammed it on the lectern.
"What is this really for?" Kartje asked his audience.
Father John Kartje (KART-chee) does things a bit differently from the typical priest. That day, Kartje was talking about an incident in which a man and a woman who performed a live sex demonstration during an optional presentation for the Human Sexuality class at Northwestern made national headlines.
In addressing the situation at Northwestern's Sheil Catholic Center, the 47-year-old lifelong Chicagoan, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Chicago, raised many eyebrows and questions—a similar reaction to many decisions throughout Kartje's life.
Kartje came to Northwestern in July 2009 after spending six years at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he worked in a doctorate program certifying him to teach. He now teaches in several places, including Chicago, and over the summer at Creighton University in Omaha. In that sense, the path to his leadership at Sheil is quite normal.
And normalcy apparently epitomizes his role as a leader at Northwestern. Kartje lives amid Evanston residents and off-campus students in an apartment on Sherman and Foster (priests often live in quarters attached to the parish, but Sheil lacks those facilities), and he makes frequent appearances on campus. In fact, Kartje is a huge sports fan and is often spotted at Northwestern athletic events.
"I go to everything I can possibly get to," Kartje says. "A number of athletes come [to Sheil], so it's a nice way to interact."
Yet, students, administrators and Evanston residents all say Kartje's unusual approach and background are major reasons why they come to Mass, despite his apparent ordinariness.
"Father John has a different style," says Sheil Director of Operations Teresa Corcoran. "I think Father John is really able to communicate with the students. Most people find his homilies extremely engaging ... there's usually a challenge in there somewhere."
Nowadays, Sheil's community is thriving—in large part thanks to Kartje, although a strong foundation had been developed several years before he arrived in Evanston. Sheil just came off a five-year, $1.5 million renovation project and is working with about half of Northwestern's 2,000 Catholic students every year, Corcoran says.
But the leader of Northwestern's sizeable Catholic community was once just a boy passionate about science and astronomy. Many people believed that reason would diminish his faith, but even as a kid, Kartje had tried to take two important parts of his life—faith and science—and create a more sensible world.
A love of the skies
In the 1980s, the Columbia space shuttle program was in full swing, making NASA and the outer realms of space increasingly visible. For many high school students, it made astronomy relatable; for Kartje, it made astronomy a career.
By most standards, Kartje had a typical childhood, even though he was the youngest of seven siblings. Growing up in Chicago, Kartje and his family went to Mass most weeks, but was not involved in the curch much beyond that. For him, churchgoing was just part of his family's routine.
"I would just spend hours laying on my back at night looking at the sky," Kartje says. "And it was just sheer wonder."
Kartje dedicated most of his energy to the skies, building his own telescope and waiting eagerly for the newest edition of Sky and Telescope magazine to come out. It never took him long to read it through cover to cover.
Still, he went to Catholic schools his whole life until he reached the University of Chicago, where he finally pursued his passion for the skies by studying astronomy, mostly of a theoretical nature.
Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy Michael Smutko, who studied experimental astronomy in Chicago and now teaches Modern Cosmology at Northwestern, was Kartje's classmate at the University of Chicago.
"He worked on these really complicated models of what happens when supersonic clouds of gas colide with other clouds of gas," Smutko says. "[Kartje's work was] totally beyond my mathematic ability."
Kartje excelled in college, proving to be a promising undergraduate member of the Astronomy department. But as he committed more and more time to the stars, he had less time to think about the heavens.
"In college, if anything, I got a lot less involved, at least in terms of going to church every Sunday," Kartje says. "I didn't much hang out in the U of C's version of [Sheil]."
Instead, he became a man of science, graduating with a Master's and a doctorate from the University of Chicago.
It wasn't until years later that Kartje embarked on a journey that changed that trajectory of his science-based life.
Change of heart, change of fields
While working as an astronomer, Kartje began volunteering in a hospital ministry. He sat and talked with patients week after week, discussing with them their pain and suffering, their relationships with God and their futures.
The work was important for the patients, Kartje says, but it also started to become important to him. He says he considered his faith more deeply, and his science background helped him get there.
"I don't look at someone having cancer and think, 'Oh, why did God give this person cancer?'" Kartje says. "I know that cancer is part of what happens to biological organisms."
Kartje visited the hospitals for three years. Even though he says he understood the science that could cure them, it was the spiritual side of things that grabbed him. The science he had known and loved all his life, though still close to the heart, was not his only calling.
"That for me, I think, was the major transformative experience, being with people in those situations of vulnerability and really being able to talk with them about their faith," Kartje says. "I felt like I needed to seriously explore [the priesthood], or let it go forever."
As he closed out his 20s, he realized his decision was clear. At age 32, with three degrees, including Bachelor's degrees in physics and math, and a mind his co-workers in the world of theoretical astrophysics considered brilliant, John Kartje would become a priest.
A different kind of education
When Kartje began the five-year seminary program required to enter priesthood, he was instantly bombarded with questions, because others thought of him as a "novelty."
"The typical question was, 'Did you decide science was wrong?'" he says. "Some people were looking for affirmation that the Bible was right, that those are evil scientists."
But for Kartje, science was key to understanding faith, so he worked hard to listen to everyone—skeptics, fanatics, anyone with an opinion. Kartje says he was simply convinced that if someone looked at it from the right perspective, they could understand and appreciate how science and faith complement each other.
Still, Kartje explains, sometimes it's just impossible.
"At the end of the day, if you're just, it's the Bible or the highway, nothing is going to convince you of the contrary," Kartje says. "And if you're convinced that any person of faith is just a deluded imbecile, nothing's going to convince you of the other direction."
Smutko says that although he could not have anticipated Kartje's decision, the move seemed reasonable.
"There are a lot of people who see it as, you're either with us or against us, you're a religious person or you're a scientific person," Smutko says. "And my experience has been, I've seen scientists on the entire range of the spectrum."
A figurative ideology
There are many times when science and faith seem to directly contradict each other. For instance, some Biblical scholars have determined the age of the world to be around 6,000 years old. But geologists have put the age of the world around 4 billion. The Bible says one thing; science finds another.
Kartje's balance of the two depends on the key notion that parts of the Bible must be taken figuratively. He says people's strictly literal interpretations caused the conflict.
To Kartje, science has the facts right. But at the same time, he says he doesn't need to choose.
"The more we learn about the physical universe, the more it prevents us from having naïve thoughts about God that are ultimately not helpful—that God is some sort of puppeteer just moving the world around," Kartje says, shaking his head.
Kartje says if we can understand how the world actually works, we can understand God's role in it all. It is this idea that leads him to believe that science and faith should coexist.
"When an earthquake happens, that's the result of tectonic plates shifting," Kartje says. "It's not evil."
The university scene
Kartje's uneven path toward the priesthood made him an appealing employee to the Archdiocese of Chicago.
Because of his univeristy background, the Archdiocese sent him to Catholic University of America, where he enrolled in the doctorate program that would allow him to teach.
Finally, after 11 years of learning in a Catholic setting. Kartje was ready for his first post, and the Archdiocese of Chicago assigned him to Evanston, Ill., where he now leads a community split nearly 50-50 between students and area residents.
But just like in the seminary, a die-hard sports fan with a doctorate and master's degree seemed slightly out of place at first.
"At first I was like, that's a bit strange for a priest," says Corcoran, who has worked at Sheil for 23 years. But she says Kartje eliminated any fears with his ability to tailor his sermons for his contrasting audiences, connecting particularly well with his younger attendees.
"I think he is able to communicate with the students on a different level than with what we've had," Corcoran says.
Each Sunday, he celebrates at least two of four different Masses, three of which—at 9:30 a.m., 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.—are typically filled with Evanston residents and families. Those Masses, Kartje says, make you "feel like you're at a typical parish."
But when it's time for the last Mass of the day, Sheil becomes a dramatically different scene. Kartje estimates that 95 percent of attendees are students at the 9 p.m. Mass, which he uses to connect with the undergraduate demographic in ways typical parish priests do not.
"I guarantee you if I had brought out the drill at the morning Mass, people would have complained," Kartje says.
The 9 p.m. Mass therefore bears his signature the most. It's the one during which he showed the drill. It's the same one, when teaching about the power of communicating in relationships, Kartje told students to turn on their cell phone ringers. The stories go on—using Northwestern's Sex Week as a sermon topic, chatting about his love of the White Sox—and Kartje, who never scripts his sermons, saves his most nontraditional ideas for the last Mass of the day.
Anthony DiMauro, president of the student group Catholic Undergrads and a Bienen senior, recalls the Masses following the sex demonstration incident as the epitome of Kartje's genius. DiMauro went to the 5 p.m. Mass that Sunday, and witnesses Kartje's differing approaches.
"Mass was brilliant for me that day," says DiMauro about the earlier Mass. "He talked about there being an elephant in the room, or in this case, a 500-pound gorilla. The big thing I remember getting out of that sermon was how, even through consent, you can still be objectifying someone."
Out of curiosity, DiMauro had a friend record the 9 p.m. Mass later that day. While the ultimate message might have been the same, DiMauro insists the two sermons were "completely different."
"He definitely engages with everyone over his homilies and that's something that contributes to the mysteries, because you know he's this great mind," says DiMauro, who attends Mass most weeks. "It's very clear when you talk to him that he's an intellectual, whereas [with priests] at home, it's more Catholic rhetoric."
Kartje can therefore be looser with his language and introduce contemporary ideas using campus culture to show students what they can take away from it all. In contrast, Kartje says in the morning he "might throw in a reference to Ed Sullivan."
Despite his unorthodox path to priesthood, Kartje's approach is working. Sheil continues to draw a large portion of Catholic students on campus, and Kartje says he is intent on continuing his work in Evanston.
Kartje's path has certainly been peculiar, and his methods are often unconventional.
But he says he has no doubt in his faith and that science has only helped serve him, and he has no plans to change the way he runs his Masses. He wants to be different, and he wants to challenge the way people think.
"I'm not trying to be the hip priest," Kartje says. "People don't want priests who try to be what they aren't. It's just a question of, can you be frank and open in conversation?"