Religion: The Affluent Monasteries

In Washington last week, Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle of Washington solemnly carried out one of the rarer ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church: the formal blessing of a new abbot. He gave his benediction to the Rt. Rev. Alban Boultwood, O.S.B., and handed him a copy of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict as a reminder of an abbot’s responsibilities. Then, as a choir chanted the Te Deum, Abbot Boultwood formally accepted the fealty of 37 monks from St. Anselm’s Abbey, the capital’s only Benedictine monastery. American-born and British-educated, Father Boultwood, 50, was chosen by the monks (in a secret ballot) last November to be their first abbot, shortly after Pope John XXIII elevated the 37-year-old community from the status of a priory.

The solemn ceremonies of installing abbots are likely to be used more and more in the nation’s future. Monasteries are relative latecomers to the institutional life of the Catholic Church in the U.S.; the first Benedictine monastery, St. Vincent’s Archabbey in Latrobe, Pa., is only 115 years old. But now they are bursting with new vitality—and new affluence. In all, there are more than 2,000 American Benedictines, almost one-sixth of the worldwide strength of that order, which is far and away the leading branch of Christian monasticism. The non-Benedictine Trappists have established eight thriving new monasteries in the U.S. since the end of World War II, increased in number from 293 to 1,018. In the past decade three other congregations—the Camaldolese, the Olivetan Benedictines and the Carthusians—have established their own way of life in the U.S. Father Joseph Brennan, prior of the Regina Coeli Olivetan Monastery at Lake Charles, La., says flatly: “There has been a Benedictine renaissance in America in the last five or six years.”

Duty Is to Pray. A monk is a cleric who takes vows of religion that bind him to live and serve in one monastic community until his death. Unlike Franciscan or Dominican houses, which are organized into tightly run provinces, Benedictine monasteries are almost completely independent of each other; a monk obeys only his own abbot. Unlike the Jesuits or other modern religious congregations, which have specific vocations to preach, heal or teach, monks are essentially contemplative: their major duty is the Opus Dei—the common recitation of the prayers in the Divine Office, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

Monastic life varies from hard to hardest, and fewer than half of all novices last out the five-to seven-year training period before final vows are taken. As a rule, Benedictines rise at dawn to recite Matins and Lauds before Mass, spend four hours or more daily in choral prayer, observe silence after the last service of the day, Compline. Stricter congregations, such as the Trappists and the Camaldolese, rise for prayer around 2 in the morning, keep perpetual silence, abstain from meat entirely.

Except for the scattered handful of Carthusian houses, all Latin-rite monasteries in the world follow—with varying degrees of severity—the rule of conduct that St. Benedict of Nursia wrote down in 529 for his community of cenobites at Monte Cassino in Italy. Although faithful to this spirit, U.S. monasteries have nonetheless made some striking adaptations of Benedictine life to suit American ways. More active and outgoing than their European counterparts, U.S. monasteries operate everything from mailorder cheese businesses to country missions to diocesan seminaries; each Sunday their monks say Mass in hundreds of U.S. churches. “The fundamental difference,” says Father Rembert Weakland of St. Vincent’s Archabbey, “is that in Europe the people go to the monastery. In the U.S. the monastery goes out to the people.”

U.S. monasteries will try almost anything that seems likely to help provide for the time and opportunity to pray. Famed since the 12th century for their farming prowess, the Trappists have added new luster to the order’s reputation through the assortment of cheese, jams, breads and cured hams they sell to supermarkets. Better known as teachers than farmers, U.S. Benedictines operate more than 50 seminaries, colleges and high schools, many (such as the Portsmouth Priory School near Newport, R.I.) with national reputations. Monasteries make ends meet through a variety of self-sustaining work: one abbey in Indiana has its own coal mine; St. Vincent’s bakes its own bread; individual monks are expert at almost everything from nuclear physics to organ music.

Most of the established U.S. monasteries are deeply engaged in missionary work, both in the U.S. and abroad. Minnesota’s Abbey of St. John in Collegeville—the largest Benedictine monastery in the world, with more than 390 monks—supervises six dependent priories, serves 34 U.S. parishes, conducts missions in Tokyo, Mexico City and the Bahamas.

With the Times. As far as piety permits, U.S. monks have kept well up with the times, hired the best of U.S. architects (Philip Johnson at St. Anselm’s, Marcel Breuer at St. John’s) to design new churches and cloisters. The Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Genesee near Rochester, N.Y., has its own fallout shelter and volunteer fire department. St. Vincent’s runs its own radio station, probably is the only U.S. monastery to have a monk with the official title of public relations director. In the interests of modern efficiency, North Carolina’s Belmont Abbey has forsworn some customary monastic pursuits: 15 years ago, all of Belmont’s cooking and shoemaking was done by monks; now they have found it cheaper to farm the work out to local tradesmen. Even the work-minded monks of the New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur, Calif., agreed to forswear tradition and let secular hands tackle the job of cell building. “We were given bricks to build our houses,” says Dom Pedro Rebello sorrowfully, “but everything ended in a chaos of mortar and rubble.”

Is American monasticism’s active involvement with the secular world spiritually wise? Because of the obvious benefits to the church as a whole, most abbots agree that it is; but they are aware of the need to keep St. Benedict’s ora et labora (pray and work) in balance. “The great question in contemporary monasticism,” says St. Anselm’s Abbot Boultwood. “is precisely the seeking of this point of balance that unifies the contemplative and the active in monastic life. In reinforcing the element of contemplation . . . American monasticism may have a long way to travel yet, but it has the heart and vigor for the journey.”