Saint Louis Abbey

Saint Louis Abbey is a Catholic abbey of the English Benedictine Congregation (EBC) in Creve Coeur, St. Louis County, Missouri. It is located within the Archdiocese of St. Louis. The monks of the abbey live according to the Benedictine discipline of 'prayer and work', praying the Divine Office five times daily, celebrating daily Masses in English and Latin, and working in two parishes under their pastoral care and in the Saint Louis Priory School, which the abbey administers. The abbey and school sit on a 150-acre (0.61 km²) campus.

Saint Louis Abbey was founded in 1955 as a priory of the Benedictine Ampleforth Abbey in North Yorkshire, England, which dispatched three monks to plant a new foundation in St. Louis. They came at the invitation of Cardinal Joseph E. Ritter and a group of prominent St. Louis lay Catholics, who desired a boys' school in their community run according to the English Benedictine educational tradition. Those original three monks, Frs Columba Cary-Elwes, future abbot Luke Rigby, and Timothy Horner, arrived in St. Louis in the summer of 1955 and set about the formation of a new monastic community, with Cary-Elwes serving as the community's founding prior and Horner serving as the founding headmaster of Saint Louis Priory School.

Cary-Elwes served as prior until 1967, when he departed for missionary work in Africa, and was succeeded in his post by Rigby. The St. Louis Priory, as it then was, became independent of Ampleforth in 1973, and was elevated to an abbey in 1989. At this time, Rigby was elected as the first abbot of Saint Louis Abbey. He was in turn succeeded by Fr Thomas Frerking, a Rhodes Scholar, former headmaster of the Priory School and Thomist scholar, who was elected abbot on July 12, 1995. He retired in June 2018. Fr Gregory Mohrman, from the class of 1976, was elected abbot thereafter.

Construction of the distinctive Abbey Church was completed in 1962, and the original 1950s monastery was rebuilt and expanded in 2000–2001. The various buildings of the Priory School also sit on the Abbey grounds; the current Lower House was constructed in the 1960s, and served as the Upper House at the time of its completion. The current Upper House was completed in several stages built from the 1970s through the 1990s.

As of 2020, St. Louis Abbey was home to a community of 26 monks. In addition to their other duties and ministries, many of the brothers are directly involved in the Abbey's school, teaching classes in most areas of instruction including Theology, Latin, Fine Arts, English, Mathematics, and Science, and coaching sporting teams including Tennis and Rugby.

In line with the Benedictine tradition of offering hospitality and respite to travelers, the Abbey maintains a guest wing on the south side of the monastery with five rooms and two gardens. The brethren make themselves available to guests to hear confessions or provide counsel.

The Abbey Church was constructed in 1962 and was finished on September 7, 1962. It is also known as the Church of the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Louis. It was designed by Gyo Obata of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum.

The Abbey Church was an important landmark and name-making project for HOK, now the world's largest architectural practice (according to the 2006 edition of the BD World Architecture 200). The church's circular facade consists of three tiers of whitewashed, thin-poured concrete parabolic arches, the top one forming a bell-tower; the arches appear to float upwards from their grassy base. They are faced with dark insulated-fiberglass polyester window walls which create a meditative translucency when viewed from within.