‘Modern day Jericho march’: Novena led Freemasons to sell Ohio temple to Catholic college for repurposing, school official says

The College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, is purchasing a Freemason temple next to its campus and plans to decommission and consecrate the space, transforming it into a place for intellectual formation, community building, and spiritual enrichment. 

The path to the purchase, however, required persistence similar to Joshua’s endeavor to bring down the walls of Jericho in the Old Testament, according to Wes Cimmarrusti, the college’s Chief Marketing Officer.

In an Aug. 11 statement to Zeale News, Cimmarrusti explained that the college took interest in purchasing the temple because the campus borders the temple building on one side. As such, “it has always been a dream of ours to repurpose the building into an extension of our campus,” he said. “You could say that we'd been thinking about this since we purchased our first couple of properties.”

The college, founded by Jacob Imam, equips students with a trade certification and Catholic Studies degree. Its first semester began in fall 2024. 

In October 2025, Imam “began in earnest to get in contact with the Freemasons about purchasing the building,” Cimmarrusti said. “He sent letters to them; he called them; he would pull his car over and get out to talk to them whenever he saw them on the street.”

“Nothing worked,” he continued. “So he began praying a novena. Each day he'd walk around the building praying that novena to our Lady,” which Cimmarrusti described as “a modern day Jericho march.” 

During the weekends, Imam’s family joined him as well; alongside his wife and children, the college’s founder persisted in the nine-day prayer.

“That worked. Or, more correctly, Our Lady got to work. Before the nine days were up, we had agreed upon a purchase price for the building,” Cimmarrusti said. 

The college announced on its website that this November the Freemasons of Steubenville will hold their final event in the temple, which they have owned for almost 100 years, and then move out. After this, the college will purchase the building and transform it into a shrine, high-end cafe, and athenaeum, a theater that can hold up to 500 people. The acoustics of the room will allow for music, intellectual debate, and other events without needing any extra microphoning. The theater will be a public hall that local schools, choirs, and civic groups can rent. 

According to the college, the shrine will have a replica of the Shroud of Turin and first-class relics. 

Cimmarrusti explained that the restoration and repurposing into the college’s vision will follow the same approach the college has taken for every property it has purchased: seeing it as “another opportunity to sanctify the temporal order in which we live.”

The college’s students will also be involved in the restoration efforts, which Cimmarrusti explained will be an opportunity for them to not only get on-the-job hours “but to live out their calling of caring for the material world in which we live.”

Planning for the project is still underway, and in the meantime, the college is working on fundraising for it. Cimmarrusti said donors have already helped raise enough for the building’s purchase but added, “It will take significantly more money in order for us to complete the vision we have for the building to serve as a shrine, restaurant and renovated theatre.”

“As it was when we began this journey towards buying the building,” he said, “the plan remains the same: pray, and then see what God does.”