Looking at Saint Vincent College today, it is easy to see the new – the smart classrooms, the state-of-the-art laboratories, the ubiquitous computers linked to each other and to a fast-paced world. Look more closely, however, and you’ll also see evidence of times and technologies long past, clues that speak eloquently of the hard work and enduring devotion that raised a College, a Seminary, an Archabbey and a Parish on this spot.

Look for irregular exposed bricks on some of the interior walls of the older campus buildings. Many were made by hand in the College’s early days by Benedictine monks who looked at empty fields and saw halls of learning. On surrounding farmlands, laboring brothers tended crops and herds, providing sustenance for the self-sufficient campus community. Other industries – a brewery, dairy farm, coal mine, print shop, carpenter shop and others – have come and gone, each in its way contributing to what Saint Vincent College has become.

In 1846, Boniface Wimmer, a Benedictine monk from Bavaria, founded Saint Vincent as the first Benedictine institution in the United States. He came with a group of monks to provide education to the Germans who had emigrated to the United States and to live a monastic life according to the Benedictine Rule. Much of what you see today was built or rebuilt since the campus expansion of the 1960s and the campus is now a gateway to global opportunities and experiences unimaginable to the earlier generations that called this campus home. Yet the connection between the old and new is as real and as tangible as the bricks and mortar – ever present reminders to all of us that the wonders of tomorrow will unfold from what we do at this Benedictine place today.