Religion: Carthusian Solitude

When he was only 13, Thomas Verner Moore knew what he wanted to be—a hermit. The son of a Louisville insurance man, young Tom Moore had had his imagination fired by a book on the so-called Desert Fathers of the Church who retired from the world in the 3rd and 4th Centuries to devote their lives to silent contemplation of God. But Thomas Moore lived a busy life far from the desert; he grew up to be a priest and a physician, prior of a Benedictine monastery, founder of a psychiatric clinic for children, and finally head of the department of psychology and psychiatry at Washington’s Catholic University of America.

He retired in 1947, and set out at once to fulfill his early ambition. That year, Father Thomas Moore, almost 70, was accepted as a novice at the Carthusian Monastery of Miraflores in Spain. This week, after three contemplative years, he was busy in the U.S. on a mission to establish the first house of his order in the Western Hemisphere.

14 Hours a Day. The Carthusian Order, founded at the end of the nth Century, is considered one of the strictest in the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike the Trappists, who live and work together in silence, the Carthusians spend most of their time in complete solitude. Carthusian monasteries, which the British call “charter houses,” are constructed around a cloister, on which opens each monk’s individual house with his private walled garden. The houses are small but include a room for eating, a room for sleeping, a study and a chapel. Each monk has a woodworking shop in which he may spend a recommended half-hour of diversion each day working with his hands.

Each monk devotes as much as 14 hours of each day to prayer, including the daily Mass and the offices, some of which he sings with his brother monks in the monastery chapel. Each sleeps some seven hours—half in the evening and half in the early morning. The two daily meals, silently delivered to each house by a lay brother, make a frugal diet: rice or beans, eggs or fish, fruit, bread and water or wine is the main meal. From September to Easter the second meal consists only of bread and water.

“We all lose weight on our diet,” says Father Moore cheerfully. “I’ve lost about 15 pounds since my Benedictine days. But we couldn’t be healthier. Pope Leo XIII once ordered a less rigorous regime, but a Carthusian delegation, all 80 to 90 years old, changed his mind. If the delegation lived so long, the life couldn’t be too hard, he decided.”

Young Man. The Carthusian Order now has about 750 members in its 26 houses in Europe. Their best known product is the heady liqueur, Chartreuse, which they have made since the 17th Century from a secret formula. But the real Carthusian preoccupation is prayer. Pope Pius XI said of the Carthusians that their special duty is, like Moses in the fight between the Israelites and the Amalekites, to be on the mountain praying while the battle is being fought out below.

Jolly, pink-cheeked Father Moore estimates that he will need at least a million dollars, perhaps two, to get the order established in the U.S., though once it is set up, a small endowment will maintain it. He has already received letters from dozens of applicants and two offers of land—in Vermont and California. Raising the money and getting things started may take some time and energy, but spry septuagenarian Moore has both. When he applied for admission to Miraflores, he carefully neglected to mention his age. Said the prior when he saw the novice: “Why, you are a young man.”