Saint John's Overview

In 1856, Benedictine monks originally from Bavaria traveled to Minnesota and built an abbey dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. They brought with them a vision of the future and the role of education that inspired them to found Saint John's University. They also brought a tradition steeped in 1500 years of monastic history.

Those two visions, forward-thinking yet with an appreciation for tradition, would lead Saint John's Abbey and its University to be a creative center for education, art, architecture, liturgy and the written word.

See  Saint John's related links.

The following remarks were excerpted from a talk delivered by Brother Dietrich Reinhart, OSB, president of Saint John's University, at the Blessing Ceremony for The Saint John's Bible on September 13, 1998 at Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota.

Saint John's

It was to this place in the center of Minnesota, that a handful of Benedictine monks arrived 142 years ago. They hoped to establish a flourishing monastic community, but at every turn they were pulled away from one another because of the needs of people outside the monastery. It was not exactly the textbook way to start a monastery, it created great tensions within the community as generations of monks labored with great generosity far afield from the cloister, while others worked, seemingly against the odds, to create and sustain a durable monastic ethos here. A great organizing principle of Saint John's history is that monks can hold to diverse ways for quite a long time, united by implicit understandings, often understated, until suddenly the ground shifts in a pronounced and surprising way and a new explicit common purpose is forged.

• Education began here with an overwhelming focus on short term, very practical preparation for the world of commerce; but the faculty -- who taught those courses well -- themselves drank from other intellectual streams and over time they remade Saint John's University into the four year residential liberal arts college which we know today.
• Not surprisingly spirituality began at Saint John's in a devotional, pietistic mode; but attention to the actual content of worship eventually changed this place into one of the great seedbeds of the liturgical movement.
• Saint John's began as one of many outposts of fortress Catholicism; but the experience of religious plurality, however awkwardly it began, opened up ecumenical horizons forever stamped by the name of Collegeville.
• The monks arrived with a number of rare and precious books; treasuring them gave birth to one of the great world class projects for the preservation of medieval manuscripts and more recently a remarkable collection focusing on the art of the book.
• And a few artistic treasures initially made their way here to be housed in simple prairie buildings; and over time, a finely-honed aesthetic sense developed here and became manifest in magnificent painting and sculpture, ceramics and architecture.

Four year residential liberal arts education, the liturgical movement, ecumenism, cultural preservation, art and architecture -- these have become signature characteristics of Saint John's. But they were not present full-blown from the start; they each needed some catalyst, some re-aligning of priorities, some re-casting of the original vision. If as we enter the third millennium, one Bible is being written by hand -- laboriously, joyfully, over many years, and under Saint John's aegis -- that is a sign of attention to our deepest monastic wellsprings, something which has been occurring for generations and which, in the years to come, can actually change the ground on which we stand, strengthening the quality and integrity of all that we do.

See full text of Time, Tradition and Place by Dietrich Reinhart.

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