Edward Catich

The Reverend Edward M. Catich
Catich teaching at St. Ambrose University circa 1970
Born	1906 Stevensville, Montana
Died	April 14, 1979 Davenport, Iowa
Nationality	United States
Known for	Education, calligraphy

Edward M. Catich (1906–1979) was an American Roman Catholic priest, teacher, and calligrapher. He is noted for the fullest development of the thesis that the inscribed Imperial Roman capitals of the Augustan age and afterward owed their form (and their characteristic serifs) wholly to the use of the flat brush, rather than to the exigencies of the chisel or other stone cutting tools.

His parents died when he was 11, and he and three brothers (including his twin) were taken by train to the orphanage of the Loyal Order of Moose, the Mooseheart campus near Aurora, Illinois.

At the orphanage he apprenticed under sign-writer Walter Heberling. After graduating high school in 1924, Catich toured with a Mooseheart band, and then went to Chicago, where he played music in bands, studied art at the Chicago Art Institute, and supported himself as a union sign-writer. Catich attended where he worked as the leader of the school band. He received a master's degree in art at University of Iowa in Iowa City.

He went to Rome in 1935 to study at Pontifical Gregorian University for the Catholic priesthood, where he also made a study of archaeology and paleography. He was ordained in 1938 and returned to Iowa to teach art, math, engineering, and music at St. Ambrose. As a priest, he served in parishes of the Diocese of Peoria, including ones in Atkinson and Hooppole.

Catich taught at St. Ambrose for forty years, until his death in 1979. The Davenport, Iowa, university now holds some 4,000 of his works, many from his legacy to Professor John Schmits, housed at the Edward M. Catich Memorial Gallery. The gallery was originally his studio and press at the Galvin Fine Arts Center and was built with a donation from Hallmark Cards, where several of his students worked.