Father Vincent did not have an opportunity to verify this statement, because a certain Father Perret, the “escape expert” of the archdiocese, showed up that night and helped him to break out of jail.
The young priest fled to the woods, where a secret seminary had been formed on an isolated farm. He taught Latin to boys who gathered there under cover of nightfall and sat around him on piles of hay in a barn. After Napoleon’s concordat with the Holy See in 1801 the seminary came out into the open and took over the old archbishop’s summer home at Meximieux.
By now things had become so quiet in the secular ministry that they had perhaps ceased to be interesting. Father Vincent once more crossed the border into Switzerland and presented himself at La Val Sainte, where he made his solemn vows on October 13, 1805.
This was just the time when La Val Sainte was enjoying a brief interval of favor with Napoleon. The Emperor conceived the idea of establishing some of Dom Augustin’s Trappists in one of the Alpine passes, where they would make themselves useful to him by maintaining a kind of hostel and posthouse on a most important military road into Italy.
Father Vincent de Paul Merle was chosen to preside over the new foundation of St. Catherine’s in the pass of Mont Génèvre. He went south in 1806 with half a dozen Trappists and some of the usual students to take up residence in an isolated house on the mountainside. Helped by soldiers, they started at once to build a permanent monastery: but the job was never to be completed, at least by monks. Napoleon’s affection for Trappists cooled down. They refused to take an oath supporting him in his conflict with the Holy See. It was time for Father Vincent to start traveling. He joined Dom Augustin at Bordeaux, where the police caught up with him: but only the abbot was wanted at the moment. Father Vincent and a few Trappists got on a boat for America.
That was in 1811. Instead of going west to join Dom Urban, Father Vincent attempted foundations in Pennsylvania and Maryland, with poorer results than Dom Urban was enjoying in Illinois. Finally, he joined the main group in New York.
All this background is necessary for an understanding of Father Vincent. He had spent only three years in a regular Trappist monastery. From then on he was either in pioneer foundations with one or two men or else isolated in parish and mission life. The active ministry was in his blood. And this influenced his whole conception of the Trappist vocation.
Like Dom Urban Guillet, when Father Vincent had to explain himself to government officials, he could say without a blush that one of the principal functions of the Order was to teach the ignorant. He did not hesitate to suggest making foundations on the express condition that the monks would devote themselves to the care of Indians or Acadian colonists.
He had, therefore, accepted all Dom Augustin’s personal ideas and innovations without surprise and without question. It does not seem to have occurred to him that there might be a fundamental difficulty involved in making a contemplative order do the work of an active order. Listening only to his own ardent love of souls and of the active apostolate, he allowed optimists to persuade him that it would be easy to get a Trappist monastery going in Nova Scotia.
His trust in this project was to weather some very severe storms. Tenacity is a Cistercian trait. Monks do not easily give up their ideals, once they have got a good grip on them, and one of the most tenacious Trappists that ever lived was Father Vincent de Paul Merle.
The summer months gave him time to visit the missions along the coast. When the winter of 1815 set in, Father Vincent, wearing his white Cistercian cowl and accompanied by three mysterious Negroes who had followed the monks from New York, entered the little village of Chezzetcook, where he settled down to two years of parish life.
The Acadian settlement of Chezzetcook, whose colonists were jealous of the traditions they had brought over from Normandy, must have been a pleasant little place. It preserved the atmosphere of a small Norman town, and the people soon developed a great devotion for their new pastor. He presided over all their public religious life and entered their Baptisms and Confirmations and weddings in the parish register, in which he signed his name and added “Priest and Religious of La Trappe.” Besides, since he was doing what he could to keep the austerities of his Rule, they came to hold his asceticism in great admiration.
Meanwhile, there was much to keep him busy. Long canoe voyages over treacherous waters, and tramps through the woods with an Indian guide brought him to outlying Micmac villages, where he preached and administered the Sacraments and taught catechism all day. At night he slept on a bed of branches, under a bearskin, while the rain came through the roof or the walls of the hut. It would have taken courage for a strong man to do all this: but Father Vincent’s health was not good. To add to the laborious life, he was having trouble learning the Indians’ language.
Unfortunately, the promised foundation was slow in materializing. The British government made no show of giving official permission, and Dom Augustin, far from offering any help, did not even answer Father Vincent’s letters. Least of all did Dom Augustin do anything about Father Vincent’s frantic appeals for a complete breviary. The poor man was leading a life that was in every respect semi-Cistercian, even down to the liturgy. For half the year he could recite the proper offices of each day. For the rest—including Advent and Lent—he had to make use of the Common or else borrow a Roman breviary from a secular priest.
In the winter of 1816–1817, when a letter from Dom Augustin suggested his return to France, Father Vincent asked for more time; but when this was granted, it had to be devoted primarily to the Indians. It was not until the spring of 1818, when he made a two-hundred-mile tour to Cape Breton and Antigonish, that he discovered a piece of property that suited him. It was a wooded valley half a mile from the sea, near a settlement called Big Tracadie. He wrote Dom Augustin a colorful description of it, calling the hills “mountains.” In October, when all the leaves had fallen from the trees and the cold winds were blowing down from Labrador with clouds full of snow, the Trappist pioneer bought these three hundred acres and put down on paper his notes on the projected Indian village, complete with school, workshops, farmlands, cooperative store, and so on; the village was to grow up in the shadow of the monastery that already existed in his mind. Not only that, but there would be a convent of Trappistines on the slope of the hill—with another school. All he needed now was some money to pay for the land, some buildings to put on it, and some monks to put into the building. Fortunately, one or two stalwart Irishmen expressed a desire to become monks, and this enabled him to write and tell Dom Augustin that “the foundation has been started” and that “postulants are beginning to come in.” He asked for a few monks from France, plans of regular monastery buildings, choir books, and all the rest.
Dom Augustin did not answer the letter. Months passed. When a year had gone by, Father Vincent tried again, with no better success. In 1820 and again in 1821 he returned to the charge. Since his letters are in the archives of La Trappe, Dom Augustin evidently received them. Either he did not know what to do about it, or else the answers went astray; in any case, Father Vincent was, practically speaking, abandoned in Nova Scotia, simply living the life of a missionary and dreaming about a monastery in his spare time.
In 1821, determined not to wait any longer, he actually took the first steps to organize his community of nuns. This consisted in sending three solid, healthy Acadian girls up the river to Montreal to make their noviceship in a convent of teaching sisters. After this they would take vows as “Trappistines.” However, he only intended them to keep the rules of Dom Augustin’s “Third Order,” which explains how he was able to get away with plans so charmingly vague.
In October, 1822, he took up his pen, told Dom Augustin all about what he had done, and intoned the same old refrain: “Please send me some monks from France, breviaries, rosaries, plans for a monastery. . . . ” This time he got a reply. Dom Augustin told him it was useless to start a foundation in Nova Scotia. Bishop Flaget of Bardstown was still anxio
us to have Trappists in Kentucky. In fact, he had offered them four hundred acres somewhere in that State. Therefore, the only thing to do was to sell out, send the “Trappistines” home to their mothers, and go to Kentucky.
La sainte volonté de Dieu!
It was not easy to do all this at once. In fact, going to Kentucky seemed out of the question. Instead, Father Vincent followed the advice of Archbishop Plessis, and in October, 1823, he sailed for France.
Dom Augustin was now nearing the end of his troubled and active career. The last years of his life were to be clouded with conflict and suspicion. The great odyssey had long since been left behind. Dom Augustin de Lestrange was a different man from the savior of the Strict Observance—the brilliant, even handsome, Trappist with a genius for adventure who carted his monks and nuns from one end of Europe to the other and ferried them back and forth across the Atlantic, making them keep the Val Sainte usages on riverboats and clippers, in covered wagons and under the trees of the forest. All this had given great scope for his energy, his imagination, his genius for making and changing plans on the spur of the moment. It had also demanded heroic dependence and the blindest possible obedience from his monks. Indeed, the only reasonable thing left for the Trappists to do, in the series of fantastic emergencies confronting them, had been to leave everything in the hands of the one man who could talk to everybody and find out about everything without breaking any of the Rules.
But now that things had settled down to their normal course, and the monks were back in France and established in regular monasteries, it was vitally necessary to return as far as possible to the peace and silence and tranquillity of the Cistercian life, to the traditional interpretation of St. Benedict’s Rule. In many cases Dom Augustin seems not to have understood the need for an adjustment. In his own mind and those of his followers the Val Sainte reform had come to be synonymous with “the Rule” and with “Cîteaux.” Everything else, even the obvious sense of St. Benedict and the old usages, was “relaxation.”
Great uneasiness arose among the Trappists. The monks began to split up into small, isolated congregations, each group trying to find a workable interpretation of the Rule and each one slightly suspicious of the others. Meanwhile, Dom Augustin had been summoned to Rome to explain many points about his administration.
The year 1823 had even brought misunderstandings between the abbot of La Trappe (to which Dom Augustin had returned when Napoleon went to St. Helena) and the Bishop of’S£ez. In fact, their relations became so strained that the entire community of La Trappe was now living at Bellefontaine, in another diocese.
It was here that Father Vincent found his major superior.
It was a winter evening. The monks were chanting Vespers in the shadows of a darkened choir. Most of them did not have the faintest idea who the old, gaunt, white-haired, used-up stranger was, when they made room for Father Vincent to take his rank of seniority among the veterans of the American campaign. Only when he was actually among them and standing in his stall, did Father Vincent’s neighbors recognize their old companion.
Dom Augustin was overjoyed to see him. It must have cheered him considerably to sit and listen to adventures that reminded him of his own best days. He encouraged Father Vincent to write it all down, and his heart was easily moved to reconsider the Kentucky project. When he heard about the Acadians and the Micmac missions and the “Trappistines,” he finally gave in and allowed Father Vincent to return to Nova Scotia and take with him enough monks to start at least the semblance of a monastery. They would be six in all, including Father Vincent himself. And he could not have been given a better subprior. Old Father Francis Xavier was a survivor of the Kentucky expedition. He had, in fact, made his vows in one of the log chapels built by the monks in America. He was a ferociously ardent supporter of the “reform” and had abandoned one of the less austere divisions of the Trappist family to throw in his lot with its strictest unit. Like Father Vincent, he was a man of one idea: and once that one idea had been sanctioned by Dom Augustin de Lestrange, it became the holy will of God and was therefore unchangeable.
The reformer of La Val Sainte sent these six men off to Nova Scotia armed with what is technically known as an “obedience”—a kind of monastic passport which serves as the monk’s official identification if he presents himself in some other monastery of the Order. Without it, he may be suspected of being out on French leave. The language of this particular document was typical of its writer. It was one of the last flourishes of the grand Val Sainte manner: “Inasmuch as you are inspired with the desire to bring the knowledge of God to a benighted pagan tribe, and in spite of the danger to your own lives, I order you to proceed on this journey. . . . ”
They sailed from Rochefort in a French man-of-war on May 10, 1823, and landed in Nova Scotia some thirty days later. It was a fair journey, but it ended in tragedy. Two of the monks fell into the bay as they tried to get into the rowboat to go ashore, and one of them was drowned. That left Father Vincent with four Trappists. His “Petit” Clairvaux was going to be very little indeed.
They settled in a little wooden building near the site Father Vincent had chosen five years before at Big Tracadie and began their official existence in the usual desperate poverty. They had no money, paying for commodities with potatoes, cabbages, and beef. The monks taught school, and the three sturdy Acadian girls who had gone to the novitiate in Montreal were summoned to Tracadie, dressed in habits, and placed in a little wooden house that had taken nine days to build. Thus, they were once again “Trappistines.”
When we read the documents that have survived from those days,2 it is almost incredible that Petit Clairvaux lasted as long as it did. Only the sincerity and personal heroism of the two men who were the life and soul of the monastery really kept it going. Their story is a strange phenomenon, a curious dead end in monastic history. Petit Clairvaux had to do without the vital support of a vigorous and thriving monastic organism, for the simple reason that it was an offshoot of a tree that was already dead. Father Vincent and Father Francis Xavier were trying to prolong the reform of La Val Sainte when the movement had become exhausted and needed only the death of its initiator before it collapsed and vanished entirely from the scene.
As the last gasp of the Val Sainte reform, however, Petit Clairvaux had something to say, without intending to do so, about the whole character of that reform. La Val Sainte had been an emergency measure. Like all emergency measures, it had many glaring imperfections: but during the time when it was needed, the vitality and austerity and sanctity of the monks compensated for the inherent weaknesses and disproportions of the reform. Now that Dom Augustin’s peculiarly active and energetic ideal had outlived its usefulness, the full stream of spiritual vitality which Divine Providence will always reserve for the contemplative Order of Cîteaux was once more flowing in its proper channel. And so, the mistakes of La Val Sainte lay fully exposed to view in the dry bones of what was called Petit Clairvaux.
The chief weakness of La Val Sainte was its essentially active spirit. The contemplative life came to mean little more than a complex of penitential exercises. If these were fulfilled—and it took plenty of action to carry them all out—then one was released from the obligation of cultivating a deep interior spirit of contemplation and could throw oneself wholeheartedly into teaching, preaching, missionary work, and the rest. That is why Father Vincent, like Dom Urban Guillet, did not fear to give everyone the impression that one of the chief objects of the Order was to educate the young. And that was why Dom Augustin had been so delighted at the project of the Indian village under Trappist tutelage.
At the moment, Father Vincent was living not at the monastery but in the presbytery which he had already occupied for so many years as parish priest of Tracadie. Father Francis Xavier was left in charge of the community and its school, but the only thing left of the Cistercian life was a bodily austerity that went beyond the limits of Cîteaux.
The first consequence of the lack of monas
tic regularity and enclosure and silence was that Petit Clairvaux was, for many years, the graveyard of contemplative vocations. In the end, no European abbot dared send anybody there. There was no interior life, and without interior life it is impossible to support the austerities of the Rule. One of the brothers, Bruno, grew tired of the monastery and went to live at the presbytery with Father Vincent. Then he tired of that and moved to a village school some miles away. Finally, he applied for a dispensation of his vows and got married. Another went back to Bellefontaine. A third, a doctor, spent most of his time practicing medicine and ranged so freely about the countryside, to the utter disregard of his monastic duties, that even Father Vincent was disconcerted. This doctor went back to France, but by that time no monastery could hold him, and he died an apostate. And that disposed of the original colony that had been sent out to Nova Scotia by Dom Augustin de Lestrange.
When the news of all this became known in the Order, Petit Clairvaux acquired a very unenviable reputation. After Dom Augustin’s death in 1827 no one wanted to have anything to do with the place, and it remained without an immediate superior or a mother house. Since this practically dissolved all official connection between Petit Clairvaux and the rest of the Order, Father Vincent and Father Francis Xavier went their own way, defending the fasts and austerities of La Val Sainte long after they had all been suppressed in the Order itself by the Holy See. An occasional friendly Irishman would give the life a trial, and this would persuade the two veterans that they really had a monastery to look after. Nevertheless, in 1836 Father Vincent went to Europe to beg a few professed Trappists from some of the best monasteries of the Order. Carefully avoiding Bellefontaine, where he was no longer persona grata, he went to La Grande Trappe, where he was in neutral territory. When the abbot tried to persuade him to give up Petit Clairvaux and return to a regular monastery and keep the Rule, he humbly agreed that this was a good idea; but later he presented his case to the heads of the Foreign Mission Seminary in Paris and the Propaganda 3in Rome and once again found himself in a position where it was the manifest will of God that he return to Nova Scotia.
The Waters of Siloe Page 12