Religion: Episcopalian Monks

The Religious Life may be defined as a method of serving God in which men or women consecrate to Him their life and labour under the perpetual vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. . . . From apostolic times there have been those who have heard in their hearts the voice of God calling them to leave father and mother, sister and brother, family and children, house and lands, all things, in short, and follow Him in complete and loving surrender of body, soul and spirit.

—from a history of the Order of the

Holy Cross by Father S. C. Hughson.

In a cool crypt under the high altar of a

monastery chapel at West Park, N.Y., 25

white-robed men sat at trude pine desks facing the tomb of their Father Founder. A few were lay brothers, most were priests, but all were monks, vowed to perpetual poverty, chastity and obedience. They were not Roman Catholics but Episcopalians, members of the Order of the Holy Cross, oldest of their church’s five male religious orders.-They were met for their Annual Chapter meeting.

After a ten-day retreat of silence and meditation, they were “refreshed, quiet and calm,” ready to legislate the affairs of their order and to re-delegate absolute executive authority to their Father Superior, youthful, friendly Alan Whittemore.

The Order of the Holy Cross was founded in 1884, among the teeming tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, by an earnest young Harvardman, Father James Otis Sergent Huntington. Gifts from inter ested Episcopalians and fees for preaching have kept it alive. Since 1904 the Order’s mother house has been the handsome, red brick, well-landscaped Monastery of the Holy Cross, across the Hudson from Hyde Park. There the monks rise at 5:25 each morning with the words: “Thanks be to God.” Four hours of their day are spent in meditation, prayer and the seven tradi tional offices of worship (Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Com pline), in which psalms are sung in ancient plain song. During the rest of the day the monks clean house, mow lawns, cultivate their gardens, collect their laundry and mail (in a 1941 station wagon), study in a well-stocked library, swim in t_e river.

“To Teach the Heart.” During con versation-less meals in the peaceful refec tory they listen to reading selected “to teach the heart [and] the intellect.” At day’s end (8:30 p.m.), with the words, “the Divine help remain with us always, Amen,” they begin the Great Silence which (except for words of worship) lasts until after breakfast the next morning.

But the Holy Cross monks’ lives are by no means all retreat and seclusion. An early rule of the order was “designed to train every man for what he can do best” and to make him ready for “any sum mons.” Best-known summons was the one which called Father Sill to found Kent School in an old farmhouse on Connecti cut’s Housatonic River in 1906. There, under the Order’s supervision, in one of the best of New England’s preparatory schools, young boys, rich and poor, do their own housework, pay what they can afford. Some of them used to get to row on one of “Pater” Sill’s Henley champion ship crews.

Two /ears ago the Order officially turned Kent over to its alumni (though a Holy Cross Father, Bill Chalmers, re mained as headmaster). But even without it the monks keep busy: <J Running; St. Andrew’s School for boys in the Cumberland Mountains.

<I Supervising confraternities of priests, laymen and Sisters.

<I Doing missionary work in Sing Sing Prison and boys’ reformatories.

1$ Preaching missions and holding retreats throughout the U.S.

EURJ Maintaining missions in Liberia and Nevada.

<I Caring for the hundreds of guests who come each year to the monastery, to stay for a day or a week.

<]I Publishing the Order’s many tracts and papers.

With a bumper crop of novices in prospect (some from the armed services), Father Superior Whittemore is optimistic of his Order’s future. Says he: “Our pres ent problem … is to adjust the principles of monasticism to the 20th Century. We must dare, by God’s help, to live dangerously.”

* Others: The Society of St. John the Evangelist (Cowley Fathers). Cambridge, Mass.: The Society of St. Francis, Mt. Sinai, Long Island; The Brotherhood of St. Barnabas, Gibsonia, Pa.: the Order of St. Bendict, Indiana.