St. Leonard, Centerville Ohio

Every once in a while, I get a brain burble, a brief flash of memory. I’m not sure what spurs this synapse.

Maybe it is the season of Lent and the liturgy sent to me by the brothers of Assumption Abbey in Dickerson, ND where I stayed on my cross-country bike trip in 2020.

Maybe it is from watching “Secrets of the Dead” on PBS as I work on a new cross-stitch project. As I work, moving my needle up and down, I listen to how civilizations rise and fall. People and places I’ve never heard of, pre-antiquity, before medieval Europe, before the spread of Christianity, people groups from places our current president might label “shit-hole countries” were building and crafting fabulous palaces using gold and silver and precious gems, living sustainably for hundreds of years—before . . . .

Sometimes no one knows. Something stops. The people die-off, are assimilated, migrate away due to ? Again, we don’t know but perhaps climate change, invaders, disease, other disasters. Bardic tales are full of stories from the past with dramatic twists of fate.

Anyway, I thought about St. Leonard’s the other day.

As a high school student in the late 1970s, the “new” high school in Centerville was located right next to a Catholic friary. At the time I had no knowledge that it was Franciscan. I also had no idea besides housing friars that there was a seminary on the grounds. But from a window I could see brothers out in the fields tending some kind of garden. There was maybe half a dozen of them bending over.

My other connection at the time with St. Leonard’s was the director of a new initiative by the Centerville/Washington Township to host a youth center. This was a fledgling project and I’m not sure how I was appointed or signed up to be on the board. I was a youth representative—highly unrepresentative of youth back then. I’d go to meetings and show up at the center to welcome whomever wandered in—like hardly anyone. Youth have their own ideas of what is cool—and it never involves a youth center. The director was Bob and he told me he’d been a brother at St. Leonard’s. My romantic heart wanted to believe he ran away, left a religious life for the world (the world of Centerville? Why not really go somewhere? The center was literally not even half a mile from the friary. Bob had a girlfriend, a nurse, and I helped him make a Happy Birthday sign for her. Maybe he gave up celibate life for love??

Two things though: The youth center was not bound to last in its little rental space and neither was St. Leonard’s. (We always called it St. Leonard’s.)

Built in the late 1950s, the property held a dormitory and classrooms and a “modern” church. At the time I remember the architecture was seemingly boring. No old wood pews, nothing ornate. More static looking—in the late 1970s I really didn’t have the sensibility to appreciate the streamlined aesthetic. Modern and post-modern, now being vintage, there is a little more appreciation.

Anyway—it closed in 1981—about the same time Bob told me he was resigning as director to go back into the ministry. His sojourn in the world was over; he’d decided to be a brother for real this time. I didn’t ask about the girlfriend.  I graduated high school in 1977 and pretty much left Centerville. I had no idea the property was remade into a senior living center.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/330998710746354/search/?q=st.%20leonard

Like the rise and fall of kingdoms, there is no trace of the youth center and only minor records of the friary today. Certainly, no buried treasure to remind us of that short blip of time in the trajectory of mankind.