Securing Their Future: Building the Abbey Endowment

Delbarton School owes a great debt to the Benedictine monks of St. Mary’s Abbey. Their hard-work and “can do” attitude helped the School persevere in the face of adversity early on, and the core Benedictine virtues and ideals that they modeled and taught made Delbarton what it is today.

In many respects, the monks were Delbarton’s “living endowment” for the first several decades of the School’s history. Until fairly recently, Benedictines employed at Delbarton School took no salary or a reduced salary when compared to that earned by similarly qualified lay teachers, in an effort to keep Delbarton accessible to students from every economic background.

Today, the monks continue to serve as the guarantors of Delbarton’s Benedictine identity and mission, through the daily witness of their prayer and community life and their work as teachers and administrators at Delbarton.

To preserve and celebrate this legacy, St. Mary’s Abbey must remain a healthy and financially secure community, able to meet the housing and health care needs of its aging monks, as well as the religious and educational aspirations of the younger ones.

Currently, St. Mary’s Abbey relies upon four main sources of revenue. The largest percentage of its income is derived from salaries earned by Benedictines at Delbarton School and from the pastoral work of the monks in area parishes and the Abbey Retreat Center.

With a significant percentage of the monks now fully or semi-retired, the Abbey must grow its endowment and other sources of income to compensate for the diminishing sources of revenue from earned income.

At the same time, some of the Abbey’s largest expense categories are fixed costs that do not change much relative to the size of the Abbey community. Moreover, several of the main expense items (health care) will continue to grow as the monks get older.

 In addition to growing the Abbey’s endowment, the Campaign will support monastic vocations and graduate education. Over the last few years, two monks have pursued the Master in Divinity degree in preparation for ordination to the priesthood in 2017. 

Concurrently, another monk earned an MA in
education and a fourth earned an MBA in non-profit administration.  These men’s studies prepare them to serve at Delbarton School or in the other pastoral works of St. Mary’s Abbey.