New North Catholic stirs memories of St. Fidelis
HERMAN — Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School may be moving to Cranberry Township this fall, but it's not the first time Butler County will be home to a Catholic high school.
St. Fidelis Seminary High School in Herman educated male students for more than 15 years on the same campus as St. Fidelis College and Seminary.
While St. Fidelis College and Seminary educated aspiring priests and other religious professionals for more than 100 years, the campus was formally divided into a college and a boarding high school in 1964, according to an archived Butler Eagle story.
Both the high school and seminary college had a Capuchin affiliation. However, the high school was geared toward college prep, not just a school for those considering the priesthood.
“As a seminary, it was geared to having young men discern where they were in their life, in the sense of what they may like to do later on,” said the Rev. Ward Stakem, who taught there in the 1970s. “Obviously, at that age, they didn't have definite, set ideas of what they wanted to do in the future. But it provided a good place and time for them to search out their interests as well as get a good, solid education.”
Once he was ordained, Stakem was a priest at churches throughout the region before coincidently returning to Herman. He's now a priest at St. Mary of the Assumption Church, which is right next door to the campus where he taught teenaged boys decades ago.
Tom Martin was among those students. He attended the school from 1977 to 1980, the year the high school closed. The college there closed two years before in 1978.
“It was wonderful,” Martin said of his experience at St. Fidelis. “It was a small school ... To put it in perspective, I went to school with kids from Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, and New York, and they lived there.
“And I, of course, was from Butler. I went back and forth. I lived at home like a regular high school student.”
Martin, who now works at the Martin Funeral Home in Butler, was part of a new commuter program that began the year he started attending school. He was among three students who commuted.
He has fond memories of the school, his friends there, and playing sports.Even today, Martin doesn't live far from the campus, which since 1996 has been home to Summit Academy, a juvenile detention school.Between the time St. Fidelis closed and Summit Academy opened, the campus was a retreat center.Stakem said that while many of his students ended up choosing fields outside the priesthood, he keeps in touch with former students, teachers and priests to this day. The intense camaraderie and the education they received still resonates, and he said going to the school is a decision a lot of the men would make again.“They formed their own sense of community in a very real way, and friendships with one another. In a way, that has lasted to them,” Stakem said.According to a press release from the school, the main reason for the closure was because of decreasing enrollment among seminarian boarders. There were 130 boarding seminarians in 1970, and only 60 in 1980.But before the high school closed, a group petitioned to open a Catholic, co-ed high school in its place. However, that never happened since not enough students expressed an interest in attending.It's not until this fall, almost 35 years later, that there again will be a Catholic high school in the county.
