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.
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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.
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