Sitting on top of the bluff, St. Leo’s Church overlooks the Mississippi River bottoms. The original church was built in 1893. It was rebuilt in 1925 after a fire destroyed the church on Christmas Day in 1924. For more than 100 years St. Leo’s Church was home to the Catholic faithful in rural Randolph County.
That was until the Diocese of Belleville closed down several rural churches through the guise of the Pastoral Plan for Parish Renewal and Restructuring in 2013/2014. St. Leo’s was one of the parishes closed. The last mass was held there in February of 2014. While the parish was officially suppressed at the time, the church was never formally closed according to Canon Law.
At the time, a group of concerned parishioners had worked out an agreement with St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, which the parish of St. Leo’s was being merged with, and the Diocese of Belleville to provide the funding necessary for the upkeep of St. Leo’s Church.
For more on St. Leo’s, please see this week’s print edition.