The Butcher Who Nearly Became a Priest — and Left $13M

He graduated from the minor seminary intending to be a Priest. Life took a different turn, however, and he ended up leaving millions to his old school.

From Aleteia

By Cerith Gardiner

Leonard Gigowski’s life took him far from the future he once imagined -- but the path he followed would change hundreds of young lives

Ask a young person what they want to do with their life and the answer can feel overwhelming: doctor, teacher, artist, engineer, priest or professional football player... It's funny that at an age when most of us are still working out who we are, we're somehow expected to know what we'll be doing for the next 50 years.

And sometimes we really do think we know. Leonard Gigowski certainly had an idea. As a young man in Milwaukee, he seriously considered becoming a priest and attended St. Francis Minor Seminary, graduating in 1943, as shared by Catholic Herald. Yet the life that followed would involve rather less time at the altar than he might once have imagined, and considerably more meat, ballroom dancing, and racing pigeons.

World War II intervened, Gigowski served in the U.S. Navy and, when he returned to a family with very little money, he went to work. He eventually became a butcher with Milwaukee grocery company Roundy's, invested wisely in company stock and later bought his own grocery store. The priesthood never became his vocation, but that didn't mean the desire to serve that had helped shape the young Leonard simply disappeared.

In fact, the life Gigowski built was wonderfully full of character. He loved ballroom dancing enough to have a dance floor in the basement of his modest home, raced pigeons and meticulously recorded their progress, and continued driving an old car despite quietly accumulating considerable wealth. Few people around him had any idea just how considerable that wealth would eventually prove to be.

The children he called his own

One part of Gigowski's younger life never disappeared, however. St. Francis Minor Seminary was a predecessor of today's St. Thomas More High School, and he remained deeply attached to the Catholic education he had received there, regularly returning to the school and getting to know its students. Although he never married or had children of his own, he affectionately referred to the students as “my kids.”

When Gigowski turned 90 in 2015, the school surprised him with a birthday celebration. Hundreds of students sang “Happy Birthday” to their elderly friend, who responded by leading them in prayer and reminding them to love God and work hard. A few months later Gigowski died, and the school discovered quite how much those “kids” had meant to him: He had left approximately $13 million to support Catholic education.

His generosity didn't end with that extraordinary figure. Today, the Leonard Gigowski Scholarship Fund provides more than $500,000 a year to help over 150 students attend St. Thomas More, meaning the legacy of a man who left school more than 80 years ago is still helping other children receive the education that shaped him.

When life takes us somewhere else

The young Leonard could hardly have known where all this would lead when he was considering the priesthood. And that's what makes his story so reassuring for anyone who has ever seriously discerned religious life only to find themselves heading somewhere entirely different.

We cannot know why his own life unfolded as it did, or what might have happened had he pursued the priesthood, but the desire to serve that was present in his youth certainly wasn't wasted. His friend Jeff Korpal later recalled that Gigowski credited his long life to God, his Catholic education and his deep faith, and wanted other young people to receive the same gift.

There is no need to turn his life into a neat story about God's Plan B. Perhaps its beauty lies in the fact that it wasn't neat at all. The young man who once imagined serving God as a priest ended up spending decades cutting meat, running a grocery store, dancing, raising pigeons and quietly building a fortune.

It wasn't the life Leonard Gigowski had once imagined, but he found his own way to give it away. And all these years later, his “kids” are still benefiting from it.