He was back at Petit Clairvaux in 1840 after an absence of four years. This time the growth of the missions relieved him of the charge of parish priest, and he was able to retire to the monastery and live with the tiny community he had founded. Before he died, however, he retired to the convent of his “Trappistines” and settled down to await the call of God, surrounded by the devoted attentions of the sisters.
On January 1, 1853, there was a great stir among the Indians on Cape Breton Island. One of the braves came running into the village to report an ominous piece of news. There was a tree that had been marked by Father Vincent years before and had thus become associated with his person. It was “his tree.” On this midwinter day it had suddenly fallen to the ground without any apparent cause, as if it had been struck by lightning. The Indians at once decided that Father Vincent must be dead—and that was, in fact, the day of his death.
He had been venerated as a saint even during his lifetime. Now his cult spread all over Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. All kinds of stories were told about him, some of them plausible enough, others more or less legendary, like the “miracle” in which he stopped a great storm by taking off his shoe and throwing it into the sea. Miraculous cures were claimed by people who had prayed at his tomb, and Bishop Cameron of Arichat testified, thirty years after Father Vincent’s death, that a Protestant was still living who claimed to have been saved from death by a prayer to the Nova Scotia Trappist.
Meanwhile, Mother Ann Coté, the superioress of Father Vincent’s “Trappistines,” declared that he had worked “an infinite number of miracles” and that she was not unwilling to part with relics—a finger of one of Father’s gloves, a lock of Father’s hair, and a bit of paper on which he had written something. The General Chapter of the Reformed Cistercians, in 1903, even considered the possibility of introducing his cause: but the matter went no further.
Father Francis Xavier assumed charge of the monastery, but it soon became clear that Petit Clairvaux could not survive unless some monks came from Europe. He appealed to the Belgian Trappists, and a colony was sent from St. Sixte, under a Father James, in 1857. They introduced regular observance, and at once the original flow of vitality from Cistercian centers in Europe began to stimulate the little Nova Scotia community. For the first time in its existence it began to prosper in the spiritual and temporal orders at the same time. The only unfortunate element was that the Belgian Trappists followed the usages not of La Val Sainte, or even of twelfth-century Cîteaux, but of De Ranc£, and this was far too tame for Father Francis Xavier. He therefore followed the road his predecessor had taken a few years before and retired to the “Trappistines,” where he could fast as much as he pleased.
With the arrival of the Belgian Trappists, Petit Clairvaux took on an altogether new aspect. It was once more admitted to the Cistercian Order as a daughter house of Our Lady of Gethsemani, which had been founded in Kentucky in 1848. The monks enlarged their farm, built mills and workshops, and put up one of the largest barns in Nova Scotia, with room for a hundred cattle. The Trappists made butter and cheese that fetched the highest price in the markets of the province. They burned bricks and built themselves a simple, rugged monastery around a cloister garth, according to the Cistercian tradition. In 1866 the community numbered forty-five members, but most of these had come from Belgium. The Nova Scotia Catholics, although they had great admiration for the monks, did not seem to want to join them.
In 1862 Petit Clairvaux made a foundation of its own in the Province of Quebec. This, too, had been one of the dreams of Father Vincent de Paul Merle; but Archbishop Turgeon of Quebec had had to restrain the ambitious pioneer by practically forbidding him to accept land that was offered him at Saint Joachim at a time when he could hardly keep his microscopic community alive at Tracadie. Even in 1862 the foundation of Our Lady of the Holy Ghost was premature. Four monks were sent from Nova Scotia to Longevin Township, in Dorchester County, near the Maine border. They built themselves a temporary monastery—the usual log cabin—in which they suffered incredible hardships when winter came. Nevertheless, the community lasted ten years and even began to show signs of prospering: at one point it had twenty-two members. It is not quite clear why the project was suddenly dropped in 1872.
More peculiar still, this monastery of the Holy Ghost tried to make a foundation of its own in the United States. It was the monastery of the Immaculate Conception, founded at Old Monroe, Missouri, a settlement of German farmers. But not much could be expected of this rather temperamental project, which had sprung into existence from the restless mind of a certain Father Gerard Furstenburg. This monk had made his vows at the French monastery of Mont des Cats but was unable to get along there. He found his way to the Holy Ghost monastery, but he did not settle down any too comfortably there, either. The superior sent him on a begging tour in the States, perhaps more to be rid of him than to raise money. Father Gerard managed to persuade two or three Trappists to live with him in Missouri, and there he started to put up a chapel. Unfortunately, he embroiled himself in more trouble here than he had ever had to face before. The nominal “Catholics” of the district were not all in favor of Trappist monks, and when he preached an inflammatory sermon against their rather wild entertainments, one of their number who happened to be drunk at the time came around after the sermon and threw a hatchet at him. Two members of the Trappist community seized the drunkard and held him down until he was in a better mood. He then went off and filed suit against them for assault and battery. The lawyer whom he retained to prosecute the monks delivered a terrific barrage of invective against the Trappists, referring to them as “the bears of the forest” and declaring that they were all worthy of death. In spite of his eloquence, however, the case was dismissed.
In 1875, three years after the Holy Ghost monastery itself had closed down, this Missouri foundation was abandoned as hopeless. Father Gerard, rather than return to Petit Clairvaux, went to Gethsemani. He stayed for a year or two and then wandered off once more to new horizons. Toward the end of the century he was once again seen in the United States, this time trying to collect money for a Trappist foundation in the East Indies.4
The wandering life of this unhappy figure is not something that comes up very frequently in the history of the Trappists—and since the introduction of the new Code of Canon Law the species has died out.
Meanwhile, the thirty-odd years of quiet prosperity that had given Petit Clairvaux the distinction of becoming an abbey5 suddenly ended with a disaster on the Feast of St. Francis, October 4, 1892. On that day a fire started in one of the old wooden buildings put up by Father Vincent de Paul. It quickly spread to the roof of the main monastery. The roof was so high that no ladder could reach it, and the fire got out of control. In a few hours the monastery was a heap of evil-smelling ruins. The monks spent the next four years in wooden shacks, suffering greatly during the winters. Nevertheless, they set about rebuilding the monastery. Before this work was half finished another fire broke out in 1896, this time destroying the temporary wooden monastery in which they were trying to live, as well as the great barn and other farm buildings.
They were by now almost completely ruined, but the monks moved into the unfinished shell of the brick monastery, where they lived in abject misery. In 1898 the General Chapter transferred them to the jurisdiction of Our Lady of the Lake, whose prior, Father John Mary Murphy, moved the whole community to Rhode Island, as we shall see in a later chapter.
The shell of Petit Clairvaux remained empty for live years and was taken over by the abbey of Thymadeuc in Britanny. It was occupied in 1903 by twelve monks, with instructions to prepare it as a “refuge” in case the Order was expelled from France. Petit Clairvaux remained an annex of Thymadeuc until 1919, when it was closed down. The threat against the orders in France seemed to have passed, and there were no vocations in Nova Scotia.
The building again became empty. In 1937 it was bought by its present occupants, the Augustinian fathers, as a refuge for memb
ers of their order expelled from Nazi Germany.
VI
The Foundation of Gethsemani Abbey
AFTER the fall of Napoleon it quickly became evident that the austere and restless history of the Val Sainte congregation would soon be a closed chapter in the annals of the Cistercian Order. By a queer paradox, after 1815 France became one of the safest places in Europe for monks, after having been for ten years the most dangerous. As a result, the scattered and more or less flourishing monasteries that had been founded in Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Italy by Dom Augustin de Lestrange closed their doors under stress of persecution, and the monks withdrew once more to their native country.
Of the congregation which existed during the Revolution and to which the Trappists owe their survival, scarcely a house remains today. The only important one is Westmalle in Belgium. The present Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance goes back to a nucleus of monasteries founded or reopened in France after the fall of Napoleon. The most important was, of course, La Grande Trappe. But there were other ancient Cistercian houses among them, like Aiguebelle, above Avignon, near the Rhone. Port du Salut was founded in 1815, and its monks have since become famous for the cheese that bears the name of the monastery.
But when Dom Augustin died in 1827, the most prosperous and fervent of the Trappist monasteries was Our Lady of Melleray, near Nantes. Melleray reopened its doors as a monastery to receive the monks that had been forced to leave the monastery of Lulworth in England. They brought to France not only the austerity of the contemplative life and the ancient liturgical chant but also some English methods of farming that started what amounted to an agricultural revolution in the Vendée. The peasants of the region were astonished to find that a system of crop rotation would save them the trouble of leaving land fallow for eight or nine years. They soon bought the improved ploughs manufactured by the monks on the English pattern, and the first threshing machine ever seen in that part of France attracted a curious crowd of farmers to the monastery.
The community of one hundred and seventy-five was under the direction of an abbot whose wisdom and experience in temporal and spiritual matters were equaled only by his generosity and spirit of faith. Dom Antoine de Beauregard, a gifted and noble cleric who had fled to England to escape the Revolution, had become a monk at Lulworth. Here he had lived through poverty and hardships not altogether unlike those which his Cistercian brothers had had to suffer in Kentucky and Illinois.
After Dom Augustin’s death Dom Antoine of Melleray became the Visitor General of the Congregation, and his wisdom has left its stamp upon the Order even till today. Dom Augustin himself had foreseen that the excessively strict regulations of La Val Sainte would not long survive his death, and practically all his innovations had been under fire for some time.
One of Dom Antoine’s first wise moves was to abolish that peculiar invention of Dom Augustin, the Trappist Third Order. In getting rid of these secular teachers, Dom Antoine relieved the Order of a most oppressive and unwieldy burden and delivered the monks from the danger of being saddled everywhere with schools and colleges. It has not generally been recognized that this move did as much to save the Cistercian Order as anything that had been attempted since the French Revolution. If teaching had become inseparable from Trappist monasteries, it would have meant a change in the very essence of the Cistercian vocation.
Then there were the famous austerities of the Val Sainte reform, which outdid St. Benedict and Cîteaux in their rigor. In theory, there was perhaps something admirable about them. Let us grant that Divine Providence demanded this special heroism from a few picked men and women in a time of crisis. There can be no question that the life of the monks who followed Dom Augustin and Dom Urban Guillet was as near as you can get to martyrdom by following a monastic rule, when we consider the fantastic situations in which the monks tried to keep to their exceptionally strict usages. It was a moral and physical immolation. We have had little chance to make more than a passing reference to one or two of its victims. Surely, as far as human beings can conjecture, the monks who died in Kentucky and Illinois died as real saints. Much more evident still is the heroism of the monks of La Cervera in Italy who, in obedience to Dom Augustin, made a public retraction of their ill-considered oath of allegiance to Napoleon, fully conscious of the fate that awaited them for doing so. The story of their deportation and imprisonment on a MediterRancan island need not detain us here. Their fate was something like that suffered by the Trappist prisoners of Rochefort.
The question raised by the life of the Val Sainte monks is not merely whether the men of our time are physically capable of such a life. That is not quite the point. Let us assume that you could fill a few monasteries with men quite capable of sleeping on bare boards for five hours a night, fasting until evening every day in Lent, on top of a long workday, with long choral offices and many supplementary vocal prayers into the bargain. The question is, would this regime be the best means for forming contemplatives? The aim of the Cistercian life is something more than mere athletic endurance.
Dom Antoine’s answer to the question was very simple and full of supernatural prudence—which is inseparable from charity.
He argued that, since St. Benedict had been praised for centuries as the wisest monastic legislator the Church had ever possessed, and since the Cistercians of the twelfth century had very successfully lived the Rule of St. Benedict to the letter and lived it as a rule for contemplatives, the wisest thing to do was to go back to St. Benedict and Cîteaux. In fact, one of Dom Antoine’s most sensible observations echoed one complaint of the first Cistercians against Cluny. The life of the monks of La Val Sainte was overcrowded with activities and with vocal prayer and with supplementary devotions, so that the harmonious balance of the Benedictine life was destroyed and personal meditation and contemplation and spiritual reading were practically forced out of the picture. Granted that the Divine Office in choir is the principal work of the monk and that he is also obliged to live by the labor of his hands; nevertheless, if he is not left free for some personal communion with God in silence and solitude and recollection, he will never become a contemplative.
Dom Antoine thought there could be nothing better for his monks than to keep the Rule of St. Benedict as it had been written and as it had been interpreted by St. Alberic and St. Stephen Harding at Cîteaux. In that way he steered a middle course between the exaggerations of Dom Augustin and the somewhat abstract and academic reform of De Ranc£, for whom work had never been a material necessity but only a penance and a humiliation. In other words, it would seem that this was a solution that came somewhere near the healthy and harmonious and well-balanced ideal of the first Cistercians. For them, the monk was a man who labored because he was poor and was poor because he loved God, and who lived apart from the world to praise God and to contemplate Him and to taste the inexpressible joys of His love in silence and in peace.
At the same time, this solution, which looked so good in theory, did not seem to work out altogether in practice. There were some Trappists who found that even the usages of Cîteaux were too difficult and imposed too severe a burden.
In 1834 the Trappists were divided into two congregations, one keeping the usages of Cîteaux and the other those of De Rancé. Each had its own vicar general, and both were subject to the Abbot General of the Cistercians of the Common Observance—for the Common Observance still survived as an ill-defined conglomeration of fragments. This was not a satisfactory arrangement, and it is quite likely that this division, this unsettled and equivocal state of the reform, inhibited the spontaneous and healthy regrowth of a spirituality that was truly Cistercian and contemplative, and which the strictness and fervor of the monks themselves might have led us to expect.
Meanwhile, things were by no means settled in France. The 1830 revolution had brought trouble to La Trappe and to Melleray, as well as to other houses of the Order. Melleray, being a large and prosperous house, was singled out for special attention. Six hundred so
ldiers camped in the monastery, and only the firmness of Dom Antoine in insisting on the rights guaranteed him by the laws of the time saved the monastery from complete suppression. As it was, however, most of the community was turned out of doors.
The result was not altogether an unhappy one. There had been many English and Irish monks in the house, and these were no sooner deported than they settled in Ireland to build Mount Melleray Abbey in county Waterford, a house which has ever since been renowned for its prosperity and vigor.
When the troubles of 1830 had blown over, Melleray was once again crowded with postulants and novices, and the places that had been left vacant by the deportees were rapidly filled. By the year 1847 house was full to overflowing.
That gave Dom Máxime, who was then abbot, two good reasons for deciding to make a foundation somewhere outside of France. He wanted to make room for postulants, and he foresaw another revolution.
And so it happened that once again the eyes of a Trappist superior were turned to the shores of America. God’s Providence definitely designed that a monastery of Cistercian monks was to be built, first of all, in Kentucky. And it was to Kentucky that the prior of Melleray, Father Paulinus, went looking for land on which to build one.
It is not altogether curious that the monks should have looked first of all to Kentucky in their second attempt to settle in the United States. They knew what a hard time Dom Urban’s colony had had, and they had heard of the eccentricities of the climate. But probably the sanctity of the first Bishop of Bardstown, who had recently transferred his cathedral to Louisville, was the real explanation why God brought Trappists to that diocese.
The Waters of Siloe Page 13