Saint Joseph Abbey Church

About this property

Saint Joseph Abbey is a Benedictine abbey in Saint Benedict, Louisiana, governed by the Swiss-American Congregation of the Benedictine Confederation. The monks of the abbey also operate Saint Joseph Seminary College. St. Joseph Abbey was founded in 1889 by a group of monks from St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana. These monks from Indiana traveled to Louisiana at the invitation of the Most Reverend Francis Janssens to form a college seminary for training local vocations. Up until this time the diocese of New Orleans was being staffed by foreign pastors and was in desperate need for native born priests. St. Benedict, Louisiana was not the first choice for the establishment of a monastery and seminary college. The traveling monks from St. Meinrad Abbey originally chose a spot of land consisting of seventeen hundred acres located in Ponchatoula, Louisiana near Baton Rouge. The monks arrived at this location in 1889 and founded a monastery and seminary. They named the original establishment Gessen. After just a few years at this location, the monks encountered many hardships including unworkable land, and illness caused by mosquitoes. In 1902 the monks decided to relocate the monastery and seminary to a former rice plantation at St. Benedict, Louisiana near Covington north of New Orleans. The monks changed the name of the monastery and seminary from Gessen to St. Joseph. The present location of St. Joseph Abbey occupies a total of 1,500 acres (6.1 km2) of piney wooded land. The main focus of the monks of St. Joseph Abbey has always been the education and formation of future priests. In the many years since its founding, the seminary has seen many changes. The seminary started off as a boarding school for young boys who ranged in age from 13 to 18. As the number of boys increased and the formation process evolved, the school later became a four-year seminary high school and a two-year college. Young men would attend St. Joseph Seminary from grade 9 until their second year of college, and would then attend a major seminary, for Theology, before moving on to ordination for the Catholic priesthood. In the early days of the seminary the students and priests (ordained monks) shared the newly built monastery. The priests resided on the first floor, the students on the second, and classrooms and the chapel on the third. The brothers of the community (the monks who were not ordained priests) occupied a separate house apart from the monastery building. Today the seminary has become an undergraduate college offering bachelor's degrees in Liberal Arts to men seeking to become Roman Catholic Priests. It occupies its own buildings complete with classrooms, dorms, and recreational rooms. The seminary buildings are totally separated from the monastery. Even though the monastery has taken on numerous types of ministries in the past century the seminary remains its main focus. The rector, vice-rector, and some of the teaching staff are monks from the monastery. In March 2016 flood waters of the Bogue Falaya River inundated the campus.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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