St. Norbert Abbey is a Roman Catholic monastery of Canons Regular of Premontre, located in De Pere, Wisconsin.

St. Norbert's is the oldest religious community of its kind in the United States, serving as the Mother Canonry to Norbertines across North America.

Priests and Brothers of the Abbey serve in parish churches, at parochial schools and at St. Norbert College, whose founder, Bernard Pennings, was the First Abbot the community.

Rather than spending the hours in Church, Norbert would go on adventures and hunts, until his conversion experience in 1112, when he become totally committed to the Christian Faith.

The success of Norbert's mission in Antwerp and across the Low Countries, led to the foundation of Norbertine Abbeys in the Netherlands and Belgium.

In 1898, St. Joseph Parish, in West De Pere, Wisconsin became affiliated with the Norbetines and served as the Abbey Church for decades.

Its use of travertine, and polished marble of deep green or white provide a sense of permanence and grandeur to the austere design.

Modeled after centuries-old European Norbertine and Cistercian monasteries, the materials utilized in constructing it were selected for both their beauty and permanence.

The building's design physically represents the history of the Norbertine Order, with a "spine stretching from west to east", at heart of the structure.

St. Bernard wrote against the most excessive ornamentation of the Churches in his time, saying, "...in the cloister, in the sight of the reading monks, what is the point of such ridiculous monstrosity, the strange kind of shapely shapelessness?

Why these unsightly monkeys, why these fierce lions, why the monstrous centaurs, why semi-humans, why spotted tigers, why fighting soldiers, why trumpeting huntsmen?

Shortly before installation, they "were consecrated by His Excellency, The Most Reverend Stanislaus Vincent Bona, D.D., Bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay ... Each bell has an appropriate name, a fitting inscription, and bears the crest of the person in whose memory it is dedicated as well as the shield of St. Norbert Abbey.

Father Durin's efforts were rewarded, and in 1892 Pope Leo XIII officially recognized the statue as a National Shrine.

[4]From 2019 to 2021, following an investigation commissioned by Abbot Dane Radecki, he made public the names of 24 Norbertines with credible accusations of sexual assault.

The paper reported, "...the Norbertines to contact[ed] Praesidium, a risk management firm focused on sexual abuse, and request[ing] an investigation.

The Texas-based group had worked with dozens of organizations and Catholic dioceses and would later help the order compile its list of priests with credible abuse allegations against them.