Before there was Benedictine the University, there was Benedict the person. Fifteen hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the fall of Rome, St. Benedict and his twin sister St. Scholastica saved Western civilization and laid the foundations for Catholic higher education.

Before Jaeger and Neuzil were buildings, they were people too. In the nineteenth century, they were part of a wave of Benedictine sisters and monks coming, with millions of other immigrants, to the United States. They founded churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools and colleges and universities. They were immigrants founding institutions for other immigrants. English was nobody’s first language. In 1885, on March 2, the Feast of St. Agnes of Prague and the birthday of Benedict and Scholastica, Fr. John Nepomucene Jaeger founded St. Procopius Abbey in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. His sister would eventually found Sacred Heart Monastery in Lisle.

A major turning point in our early history was the move to the Illinois countryside. Anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant fervor was on the rise in urban Chicago. Fr. Neuzil had a knack for education and for real estate. The monks purchased 104 acres of farmland from the Morris Neff family, including the two-story limestone Neff family farmhouse—the Lisle campus’s first classroom, library, residence hall, health center, dining hall, student lounge, faculty lounge, locker room, art gallery, and chapel.

And then the cornerstone was laid for an ambitious century and more of teaching, learning, scholarship, and service, seeking truth and justice. And that’s where we enter the story.