Montforts of Bay Shore selling Catholic retreat house that once served as seminary for youth

The Catholic Church was ascending in America when the Montfort Missionaries turned a mansion in Bay Shore into a special kind of boarding school: a place where teenage boys could live, study and contemplate whether God was calling them to the priesthood.

Now, a century later, so-called minor seminaries are a relic of the past, and the Montforts are marking the end of an era. They are saying goodbye to the property and a proud history that started in 1926.

The religious order has sold the building on Saxon Avenue and its surrounding 13 acres to a local group that plans to revive its use as a boarding school, this time run not by Roman Catholics but by Muslims.

For the Montforts, who saw hundreds of boys traverse the seminary’s hallways until it closed in 1972, it is a bittersweet ending. For the last few decades, the building has served as their headquarters, a retreat house and a home for elderly priests.

But with the number of Montforts dwindling and costs mounting, they can no longer hold on to what for them was a special and sacred place.

"I'm grateful for what we were able to accomplish for the 100 years that we were here," said the Rev. Thomas Poth, the provincial of the Montforts in the United States. "It feels like it's complete."

Dwindling numbers

For the last few weeks, Poth has been busy boxing up archival papers, removing stained glass windows and selling or giving away special objects like a granite altar.

The religious order will vacate the property by July 25.

"The reality is we don’t have the members anymore and we can’t maintain a structure this size, so we have to let go," Poth said. "It's 100 years, and we're letting go. We're moving on."

The Montforts, founded in 1706 by a Catholic priest in France, today have about 800 priests and brothers in 35 countries — only 10 in the United States. Most are based on Long Island or in Connecticut.

It cost thousands of dollars a month just to heat the former seminary during the winter — even with the temperature kept at 55 degrees, Poth said. That, along with the lack of income from retreats and other activities that vanished after the COVID-19 pandemic, made it financially unsustainable.

The Montforts sold the property in June. Poth declined to provide the sale price. The money will help finance the order’s other ministries, including the Shrine of Our Lady of the Island in Manorville along with work overseas in regions including Africa.

A group headed by Suleymaniye Mosque in Dix Hills has purchased the property. Representatives declined to comment.

Changing times

It was a heady time in America for Catholics in the 1920s when the Montforts opened their minor seminary for high school aged boys on a piece of waterfront property on Awixa Creek, which leads to the Great South Bay. Just two years later, and after centuries of anti-Catholic bias, former New York Gov. Al Smith became the first Catholic major-party nominee for U.S. president.

Many minor seminaries were like private boarding high schools, except with a divine mission. Besides studying math and English, students also took religion courses. Not all went on to become priests, but many did.

By 1963, three years after John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic elected U.S. president, the Montforts bulldozed the mansion. In its place they erected a sprawling new building with dorms, classrooms, a library, a science lab, a gym, a dining hall and an industrial-sized kitchen. The school, small but spirited, fielded soccer, tennis, basketball and baseball teams, too.

Its chapel was especially striking, with six floor-to-ceiling, hand-painted tile panels depicting key moments in the life of the order’s founder, St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort.

The seminary could accommodate 120 students in grades 9-12, though it peaked at around 60 students in the 1960s, Poth said.

The school imposed a semimonastic lifestyle so students could focus on their studies and spiritual life, he said. For most of the seminary’s history, students could not leave the property throughout the school year. They were not supposed to date. Their parents could visit once a month, on a Sunday. Students traveled home only on major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Some entered the seminary as young as 13.

Social upheaval in the 1970s

By the early 1970s, after the liberalizing reforms of the 1960s Vatican II council along with other societal upheavals, the number of men entering the priesthood started dropping sharply. Many minor seminaries, including the Montforts’, closed.

The United States had 122 minor seminaries in 1967. Today there are three, said the Rev. James Kuroly, president rector of one of the surviving ones: Cathedral Preparatory School and Seminary in Elmhurst, Queens.

Despite its closing, the Montforts’ seminary had a profound impact on many of its graduates, whether they became priests or not, Poth said.

"It was really an incredibly good experience in a lot of ways," said the Rev. Francis Pizzarelli, who entered the minor seminary in the late 1960s at age 14 and went on as a Montfort priest to found Hope House Ministries, a well-known drug rehabilitation program in Port Jefferson. "I thought it was really life-changing for me."

"It was really this sense of community and the importance of community," he added. "It's really where I also had the seeds of social justice planted."

The education was top-notch, he said, and he learned to write well, think critically and debate.

Steven Carrier also entered in the late 1960s, and though he did not become a priest, the seminary experience changed his life, he said.

"I have only fond memories. There's nothing that I would change," he said. "It was a community. We were a family."

He came to love and admire the Montforts, said Carrier, 75, now a married father of three and a public school English teacher in Connecticut. "There’s nothing like a Montfort father. When you listen to one of the Montfort fathers celebrate the Mass ... you’re almost transfixed, so to speak. It’s almost transcendental."

The Montforts will go on

The Montforts say they are accepting the transition with tranquility, and the order will keep functioning. They plan to relocate their headquarters to part of the mother house of the Daughters of Wisdom religious order in Bay Shore.

"It will be a loss for the church in Suffolk County, because it was a great retreat center," Pizzarelli said.

Still, "Father de Montfort would be smiling if he was with us, because we wouldn't want it to close but it's not being utilized," he said. "I am delighted that a Muslim community purchased it and are hoping to make it a school. In some ways, it's continuing our tradition in education."