Benet Academy
Benet Academy is a private, highly competitive, co-educational, college-preparatory, Benedictine high school in Lisle, Illinois, United States, overseen by the Diocese of Joliet. Founded in 1886, the school was initially established in Chicago as the all-boys St. Procopius College and Academy by Benedictine monks, who also operated the St. Joseph Bohemian Orphanage. In 1898, the orphanage moved to Lisle, about west of Chicago, to be joined by St. Procopius three years later. In 1926, Benedictine nuns constructed the all-girls Sacred Heart Academy near the orphanage and school in Lisle. The orphanage closed in 1956 to make room for St. Procopius Academy, which separated from the college in 1969. Due to rising costs and waning enrollment, Sacred Heart merged with St. Procopius Academy in 1967 to form Benet Academy on the St. Procopius campus. Since then, numerous building projects have been undertaken to expand Benet's athletics, music, and science programs.
Admission is competitive and relies on entrance exam scores, transcripts, and performance on standardized tests. All students complete a college-preparatory curriculum and may earn college credit through programs including Advanced Placement. As of 2023, Benet's average ACT test score regularly exceeds state and national averages, and more than 99 percent of students go on to college after graduation. The school's academic program has been featured in reports by the Chicago Sun-Times and U.S. News & World Report.
Notable alumni of the school include Bishop Robert Barron, NBA player Frank Kaminsky, Jim Ryan, and Grammy-winning singer Dave Bickler.
History
Founding in Chicago
In the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire, Chicago's working-class Pilsen neighborhood, a predominantly Czech enclave, expanded quickly. To serve this growing ethnic population, St. Procopius parish was founded in the summer of 1875, near the intersection of 18th and Allport Streets. The parish was named for Saint Procopius of Sázava, who founded a monastery in Bohemia in the eleventh century and became the first saint from Czechoslovakia. Vilém Čoka served as the first pastor. Planning to build a school, Čoka left it to the community to decide if the school would be secular or Catholic. They chose a Catholic school, despite the fact that only 25 percent of Pilsen's Czech population was Catholic. As the parish outgrew his capacity to serve them, Čoka turned for help to the Order of St. Benedict.Rev. John Nepomucene Jaeger, the first Bohemian abbot in the United States, was urged to establish a monastic community to teach at parochial schools in Bohemian as well as English. He founded St. Procopius priory in 1885. The priory took control of St. Procopius parish in January 1886, and Jaeger became the pastor. Jaeger also founded a convent in 1895, consisting of nuns brought from St. Mary's Convent in Pittsburgh and headed by Jaeger's biological sister, Mother Mary Nepomucene Jaeger. The Czech-American media had pushed for a convent to prepare Czech-speaking nuns for teaching positions in Czech parochial schools, which had previously hired mostly lay teachers trained in Austrian normal schools. The nuns were transferred from Pittsburgh to St. Scholastica's Convent on Chicago's north side, but later that same year moved to an old parish building at Ashland and 19th Streets, where they would remain until 1912. A section of the convent was converted into a music school. Graduates taught in parishes throughout the nation.
The priory was elevated to the status of abbey by Pope Leo XIII in 1894, and the monks founded a school for lay monks to help build a self-sustaining source of revenue. Failing to attract a single prospective applicant in over seven years, they expanded enrollment to students with no intention of joining the clergy. The two groups would eventually be taught separately, and the monastic students were trained to become priests fluent in Bohemian, German, and English and prepared to preach to ethnically diverse congregations. Lay students were trained for employment in the business world.
In 1900, Chicago had one of the largest Czech populations of any city in the world, with approximately 75,000–100,000 Czechs living in the city's 10 Czech communities. Some 50,000 Czech immigrants were served by the three Czech parishes of Chicago—16,000 to 20,000 of them by St. Procopius. These Czech immigrants wanted to assimilate into American society, but also wanted to pass their language on to their children. The abbey established St. Procopius College and Academy in 1887 as a school that taught men of Czech and Slovak descent. It became the first Czech institution of higher learning in the nation, and in 1920 it remained the only Czech college. Rev. Procopius Neuzil was named the first teacher and director. Classes began on March 2, 1887, when Neuzil taught a remedial course to two students in two small rooms at 704 Allport Street. Enrollment grew to 20 within the week, taught by three instructors during the four-month term. The first full year of classes began in the fall of 1887. The college was chartered by the State of Illinois in 1890; only a two-year high school program was offered at the time. In 1893 the college published its first catalog, which urged Czech parents to enroll their 13-year-old boys. The academic curriculum included a preparatory year to teach elementary school subjects to remedial students. The two high school years were referred to as "Latin years", and included required courses in Czech, English, Latin, math, orthography, history, and religion; optional courses included German and bookkeeping. Following the Latin years, students were enrolled in the business course, which included math, bookkeeping, economics, composition, history, oratory, and religion.
Orphanage
The Benet Academy campus in Lisle began as an orphanage. On March 14, 1899, the abbey founded St. Joseph's Orphanage on a farm in Lisle purchased from one Serafin Rott, and transferred 10 Czech orphans there from St. Hedwig's Polish Orphanage, which charged the parishes more for housing non-Polish orphans. It opened under the supervision of the Sisters of St. Benedict. Abbot Jaeger allowed the orphanage to use the land for free until more satisfactory housing could be constructed. The orphanage lacked stoves, fuel, adequate bedding, decent food, and any stable source of income. Neuzil, then editor-in-chief of the Czech Benedictine Press, raised $80,000 within 12 years from the generally impoverished Czech immigrant community through local publications. A new building was commissioned in 1899 to accommodate the increasing number of applicants for admission, including orphans from out-of-state. The new building was dedicated on July 2, 1900, at the same time as the cornerstone was laid for St. Procopius College, about away.Due to increasing applications for admission, still more space was required, and William Schwartz sold the abbey of land in Lisle. On July 16, 1911, a new building was dedicated on the grounds of what is now Benet Academy, the same day the cornerstone was laid for the nearby Sacred Heart Convent. A girls' dormitory building was built in 1923. It was later converted into classrooms and renamed Benet Hall). A power plant, a larger chapel, and additional classrooms were dedicated in 1926. A gym was built in 1936; at that time the facility housed approximately 400 orphans. Twenty-three headstones from that period can be found in a small cemetery on the northwest side of the school, where orphans as young as three, one of the workmen, and several former orphans who had been raised at St. Joseph are buried. According to school lore, ghosts of orphans still haunt the fourth floor of St. Joseph Hall and the basement of Benet Hall, where the nursery of the orphanage once was.
Elementary schooling at the orphanage featured better equipped classrooms than the original building. A few years after operations moved in 1911, the school offered a two-year business program. By 1948 the orphanage comprised the Lisle Manual Training School for Boys and the Lisle Industrial School for Girls, both of which were managed by the Sisters of St. Benedict and run by the Archdiocese of Chicago. In the 1950s Petru Hall was built as an annex on the east side of the dormitory building.
The archdiocese assumed control of the orphanage in 1920, and began accepting orphans from the Juvenile Court of Cook County, most of whom came from broken homes whose parents did not pay the fines imposed by the court. This discouraged donations and strained the orphanage financially. Archbishop Samuel Cardinal Stritch, discovering that only 12 of the 255 children were actually orphans and only five of them were Slavs, closed the orphanage in 1956. The 12 true orphans were moved to Holy Angels Orphanage in Des Plaines. Bishop of Joliet Martin Dewey McNamara gave the former orphanage buildings to St. Procopius Academy, which was at that time still combined with the college.
College in Lisle
As enrollment increased to 46 in 1891, it became obvious that St. Procopius College's enrollment would soon outstrip its facilities in Pilsen. Neuzil was replaced as rector by Rev. Ildephonse Wittman, also a Benedictine, in 1894. In 1896, the Abbey bought a farm in Lisle from Morris Neff to provide more space and a "better atmosphere". On March 12, 1900, a new building was approved, to be built at the southwest corner of Maple and College Avenues. The groundbreaking was held on April 19, 1900, the school moved in May, and the new facility was dedicated on July 1, 1901, by Peter Muldoon, Bishop of the Diocese of Chicago. Classes began in September with six faculty and 11 students. Atheists in Chicago vehemently objected to the Catholic church-run school, but the Czech community came to the school's defense. Limited financial aid for the generally poor Czech immigrants led to meager enrollment. Attendance grew from 13 in 1901 to 100 in 1908.The academy offered its first four-year high school program in 1904, with both "classical", or college-preparatory, and "commercial", or vocational, programs. Students enrolled in the commercial track studied for three years, the first two being identical to the classical track and the third consisting of specialized coursework. The commercial program was dropped in 1915. Tuition for a semester cost $80; it was increased to $100 in 1909. As of 1921, the school enrolled only men of Bohemian or Slovak ancestry.
Income and enrollment fell during the Great Depression. Between 1917 and 1930, enrollment fell from 205 students to 140. The school sought accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, but the application was denied because the college and academy could not be accredited as a single institution, and financial constraints prevented their separation. In 1932 the abbey and the school lost most of their money when the Kaspar American Bank in Chicago failed. Academic programs and student activities were not greatly affected, in part because the faculty was mainly clergymen, who were not highly paid. Still unaccredited, the school was certified by the state of Illinois in September 1934.
Students, faculty, and clergymen sustained themselves with food produced on the Abbey Farm, which they maintained until the 1970s. Approximately 1,500 chickens provided eggs, while Brown Swiss cattle provided milk. Meat came from the farm's supply of bulls, hogs, and heifers. Bee hives produced honey and wax, while a cannery produced more than of food products.
World War II caused enrollment to decline and the student body consisted mainly of high school students and seminarians. Following the war, new students enrolled, and the school built a temporary facility in 1947 to accommodate them. Students from Illinois began to replace out-of-state students, the percentage of day, or commuting, students rose, and the school employed more lay teachers. After the war, the previously ethnic Czech college acquired a more diverse student body, due to rising enrollment caused by the G.I. Bill. By 1947 the high school enrolled 30 students. Better times and higher birth rates led to growing enrollment at St. Procopius in the 1950s and 1960s.
With the gift of the former orphanage facility, the academy began to operate independently from the college in 1957. It was accredited on March 28, 1958. St. Procopius College was renamed Illinois Benedictine College in 1971, and Benedictine University in 1996. Under the leadership of its first principal, Rev. Thomas J. Havlik, the academy added new classrooms and St. Martin Hall to its facilities.