The Saint Louis Priory School, a Catholic secondary day school for boys, is located on a 150-acre campus in Creve Coeur, St. Louis County, Missouri, within the Archdiocese of Saint Louis. The school is run by the Benedictine monks of Saint Louis Abbey as part of their religious ministry. History The school was established in 1956, at the invitation of St. Louis Catholics, by monks of the Benedictine Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire, England. The corresponding Priory of Saints Louis and Mary (now Saint Louis Abbey), a Benedictine monastery, was established in 1955. The Priory, which is a member of the English Benedictine Congregation, became independent of Ampleforth in 1973, and was elevated to an Abbey in 1989. The founding Prior (1955–1967) was Reverend Columba Cary-Elwes, an author, monastic leader, and former titular Abbot of Westminster. The founding headmaster was scholar and author Rev. Timothy Horner, O.S.B., who also founded the school's first athletic team, the Rebel Ruggers. The history of the monastery and school was chronicled by founding monk and original headmaster Fr. Timothy Horner, O.S.B., in his In Good Soil: The Founding of the Saint Louis Priory School 1954–1973 (2001). In this history, Horner describes the initial contact with the interested St. Louis Catholic laymen, and explains the process of founding a new school in the English Benedictine Congregation. As Father Timothy notes in In Good Soil, the purpose of school, as conceived by the lay St. Louis Catholics who initiated the project, was to "offer its students a Catholic-college preparatory education of the highest excellence so as to enter the colleges, universities, and technical schools of their choice." By the middle of the 20th century, Catholics had gone to great lengths to develop their own educational system and were expected to support it, so the fact that the school was founded with a view to sending its alumni to non-Catholic colleges was something of a departure for the time. More than sixty years after its founding, the purpose of the school remains remarkably consistent with the vision of its founders. According to its website, the school exists to "provide a Benedictine, Catholic, college preparatory education of the highest excellence so as to help talented and motivated young men develop their full potential as children of God." Headmasters Rev. Timothy Horner, OSB 1956–1974 Rev. Paul Kidner, OSB 1974–1983 Rev. Finbarr Dowling, OSB 1983–1992 Rev. Thomas Frerking, OSB 1992–1995 Rev.