- ST. NORBERT ABBEY
- DE PERE, WISCONSIN, U.S.A.
- Rev.
Leonard W. Wagner, O. Praem.
- b. Friday, Oct. 4,
1912 – d. Wednesday, Mar. 11, 1981
Our brother
Leonard Wagner was born in
Cleveland
,
Wisconsin
, in 1909. After graduating from
St.
Norbert High, he joined the Order in 1931 and professed solemn vows in 1936.
Frater Leonard
was assigned to the Southeast Catholic faculty in 1935, where he taught German
and Latin through 1937. After
ordination in 1938, he taught at
St.
Norbert High and was prefect of the college.
In 1941, he joined the faculty at Central Catholic and assisted at St.
Willibrord.
With the title
of “The Longest Reigning Novice Master,” “Moose,” as he was called, took
over the novitiate in
Madison
in 1946, and remained at the helm until the opening of the new abbey in 1959,
when the novitiate was moved.
Novice-frats
spent their entire first novitiate year under the tight control of Moose,
imprisoned on the 11 acres of the Madison property: studying and praying,
planting and weeding, pruning and harvesting, mowing and shoveling, laundering
and cooking, building and destroying, …and showering once-a-week.
Is your “Opera diei” still
on your desk at all times?
After the
novitiate moved to the abbey, Moose remained as superior on the Madison
property, which became a house of studies for those men at the university, until
his retirement to the abbey in 1969. He
spent his final days at the Guardian Angel Nursing Home until his death on
Wednesday, March 11th, 1981 at the age of 71.
