[1][5] After being ordained, Leander Schnerr was assigned as the pastor of various German-speaking parishes in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

[9] After the Great Chicago Fire, Schnerr informed Boniface Wimmer of the destruction of the priory, convent, and whole church.

[15] Schnerr saw the archabbey as an outwardly-focused institution that should play a role in the wider Catholic Church in the United States instead of an inwardly-focused one away from the world.

The next year, he attended the meeting in Rome that established the Benedictine Confederation and the World's Columbian Exposition.

[20] The college attached to the Colorado mission closed its doors in 1918, but Holy Cross Abbey, the result of several mergers, lasted until 2005.

[21][22] The mission to Illinois created St. Bede Academy, a Catholic high school for boys, and an Abbey.

[25] The archabbey's work in the Deep South during Reconstruction brought the first African-American monks to Saint Vincent at this time.

[27] This brought the archabbey into conflict with the growing Temperance Movement and parish priests in the surrounding diocese.

Due to the conflict, Apostolic Nuncio Francesco Satolli wrote to Schnerr asking him to stop brewing the beer in large quantities for sale.

[29] As his archabbotcy went on, the student body diversified as Americans of Irish, Italian, Cuban, and Eastern European descent became a larger proportion of the population of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

[32] He was buried at Saint Vincent Cemetery on September 9, 1920, after a Requiem Mass celebrated by Ernest Helmstetter, the abbot of St. Mary's Abbey in Morristown, New Jersey.

[33] Schnerr is memorialized by Leander Hall on the archabbey and college's campus which serves as the monastery's guest house and the home of seminarians.