Religion: The Black Monks

When Father Boniface Wimmer, with 18 other young Bavarians in his charge, arrived in New York City 100 years ago, he found no one to meet them, no one to interpret, no one to show them how to get to western Pennsylvania, where they planned to found a monastery. New York’s German priests advised him to settle down in a U.S. parish. But stubborn Father Wimmer exploded in Süddeutsch: “Jetzt geschieht’s erst recht!” (“I’ll do it in spite of all this!”)

His words might have been a motto for the abbey he founded. Over & over again, St. Vincent’s—the oldest Benedictine monastery in the U.S.—has had to overcome new obstacles in transplanting a 1,300-year-old order into a brand-new world.

In 1860 Father Wimmer decided to add a brewery to his new monastery, sell the beer to Irish railroad gangs who worked nearby, thus 1) make revenue for the monastery and 2) wean the Irish from their whiskey. Special permission for the brewery was granted by the Vatican, after intercession by the abbot’s chief patron King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Irishmen, monks and thirsty wayfarers enjoyed the beer.

But Protestant neighbors were scandalized: brewing and the worship of God seemed incompatible, confirming their suspicion that rum and Romanism went hand in hand. The scandal grew so great that the uneasy Bishop of Pittsburgh, then a center of anti-Catholicism,* ordered that no more beer be sold (though the monks brewed for themselves until Prohibition).

The Virgin & the Dynamo. Since Wimmer’s day the abbey has felt the pressure of an increasingly industrialized and secularized society. It has its own power house, where the abbey’s Brother Victor builds naive, pious grottoes and crèches among his dynamos. It has its own coal mine, but hires miners. It still cultivates 1,000 of its 3,400 acres, has a herd of 100 registered Holsteins, but farm labor is done by hired hands. The monks suspect that their farming does not pay, yet avoid careful accounting lest they be forced to give up a basic Benedictine tradition of agriculture. The chief occupation: teaching in their crowded prep school and college.

The community, which once numbered over 100, has dwindled to 25. Some of its members are white-bearded relics of the missionary era. The monks admit that the U.S. atmosphere does not draw many men to the monastic life. But in the century since Wimmer’s arrival, the monks have proved that Benedict’s rule—work, study and the communal praise of God—could be transplanted to the U.S.

That fact lay behind last week’s centennial celebration in which the monks of St. Vincent’s joined with Catholic citizens of nearby Latrobe and Greensburg, Pennsylvania politicos, and Benedictines from all over the U.S. Said democratic, Saar-born Archabbot Koch proudly: “Like members of a family, priests and brothers of St. Vincent’s have set up branches all over the country. In all of the Benedictine abbeys in the U.S. there are some fathers and brothers from St. Vincent’s.”†

*The Catholic cathedral of Pittsburgh is a monument to the anti-Catholic era: its windows are high above the street, beyond the reach of most stone throwers.

†Benedictines (unlike the Jesuits, Dominicans, etc.) have a very loose organization; each abbey is autonomous. Besides the three monastic vows of all orders (Poverty, Chastity, Obedience), each Benedictine takes a Vow of Permanence, so that he cannot leave his abbey without permission nor can the abbot send him elsewhere without his consent.