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A Catholic media company and school has purchased a massive corporate retreat in St. Louis County, with the intention of moving its headquarters there.
Colorado-based Augustine Institute purchased the Boeing Leadership Center, the 284-acre retreat where the aerospace giant hosted corporate training for two decades until the Covid-19 pandemic, the organization said Tuesday. The campus is located at 16805 New Halls Ferry Road in unincorporated St. Louis County.
The purchase closed Monday for $19 million, the nonprofit Catholic institute said. The organization plans to use the campus to create a “national center for evangelization” in St. Louis, according to a news release. No asking price had been listed for the property, but St. Louis County appraised it at $27.5 million last year, records show.
When news of the potential deal was first reported in March, Augustine Institute President Tim Gray told Catholic news organization The Pillar that the organization would pay cash for the property after it finalized donors and conducted due diligence on the site. The report from The Pillar said that the purchase could close by early May.
The transition to move the organization’s operations and theological school to the scenic wooded campus will take place over the next several years, according to the release.
The group’s headquarters and Graduate School of Theology will open at the site for the fall 2024 semester, the institute said.
The institute, founded in 2005, purchased the training campus with the intent to expand, according to the release. Its current Denver campus has no room for student housing or more enrollment at its graduate school, Gray previously said. Most of the school’s 500 students are distance education students, he told The Pillar.
Along with being a major publisher of Catholic catechetical and sacramental educational materials, the institute is a film and podcast producer and owns Catholic content streaming service formed.org, which has more than 1 million subscribers, The Pillar reported. The organization posted $28 million in revenue in the 2021-2022 fiscal year, making it one of the largest Catholic publishing and media companies in the country, according to The Pillar.
Arlington, Virginia-based Boeing, which has substantial operations in St. Louis after its 1997 acquisition of St. Louis-based aerospace company McDonnell-Douglas and is one of the region’s largest employers with 16,000 employees, began marketing the property for sale last year. Boeing had temporarily paused its corporate training operations there since the pandemic, but has now pivoted to more local and virtual training, a company spokeswoman said.
The North County site had served as a “corporate university” for Boeing executives and managers from across the country for two decades, housing thousands of employees a year in hotel-like lodges and hosting classes at a training center overlooking bluffs on the Missouri River. The property was originally owned by the Desloges family and still has a historic chateau, ballroom and chapel.
Gray, of the Augustine Institute, said in a statement that buying the campus gave the institute an “unprecedented opportunity” to expand its graduate school with a live-in residency component and advance the organization’s mission of “helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.” The organization has been working with the St. Louis Archdiocese on the project.
“The BLC’s state-of-the-art facilities will transform the work of the Augustine Institute by allowing us to take our curriculum and resources beyond a digital interface, which already reaches millions around the world, into a national center for Catholic conferences, retreats, evangelization and fellowship,” Gray said.
The Pillar reported that the St. Louis Archdiocese, which is currently undergoing a resizing of its own properties by closing some schools and churches, first approached the Augustine Institute with the idea of buying the Boeing campus last year.
St. Louis Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski said in a statement that he believes the institute will “transform this property into the premier center for the New Evangelization in the United States,” leveraging the central location of St. Louis to bring together Catholic groups nationwide.