The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  Bishop Flaget had come to America in 1792 as a refugee with Father Badin, the first priest to settle permanently in Kentucky. The bishop was a Sulpician, and he probably saw something of Dom Urban and his Trappists, not in Kentucky but at Baltimore, where they were received by the fathers of Monsignor Flaget’s community.

  In 1808 Bishop Carroll, finding the burden of the entire United States too heavy for his own shoulders, asked Pope Pius VII to give him some more bishops. Accordingly, four new dioceses were erected that year: Boston, New York, Philadelphia—and Bardstown, Kentucky. And so Monsignor Flaget became Bishop of Bardstown and head of a diocese that included Kentucky, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Iowa, and about half of Arkansas.

  It was a task that called for more than human courage and energy.

  The new bishop did not arrive in Kentucky until Dom Urban and his Trappists had already moved west to Illinois. They still were in his diocese, no doubt, when Bishop Flaget came down the Ohio River on a flatboat in 1811, accompanied by the priests who were to form the nucleus of his diocesan seminary. But by the time he had had a chance to visit the western reaches of his territory, the bishop found the Trappists had taken flight and were at home in France.

  Yet, the memory of the monks and their holiness and their poverty had not died in Kentucky. There were still a few men who had been to the monks’ school, and these were among the most solid and hard-working and intelligent and faithful Christians in the bishop’s flock. The echoes of the sweet, solemn cadences of Gregorian chant in the monks’ log-cabin chapel, in the woods of Nelson County and Casey Creek, still lived in the memories of Kentucky Catholics.

  The arrival of Father Paulinus in Louisville in 1847 was ^ answer to many prayers.

  The eighty-six-year-old bishop, white-haired, leonine, beaming with the simplicity and overflowing benevolence of the saints, received the emissary from the French Trappists with open arms and tears of joy. He sent him at once into the country that had once seen the labors of Dom Urban Guillet’s men, and his coadjutor, Monsignor Martin Spalding, became the Trappist’s guide and adviser.

  It was not long before they found a good-sized farm with some buildings on it and plenty of woodland. It was within sight of Rohan’s Knob, in whose shadow the Trappists had first settled thirty-two years before in their temporary home on Pottinger’s Creek. Gethsemani, as the farm was called, belonged to some religious of a congregation founded by Father Nerinckx—the Sisters of Loretto. The sisters had opened a small orphan asylum in the middle of a valley in Nelson County. But the enterprise proved inconvenient, and they were looking for a less isolated site.

  So, Father Paulinus struck a bargain for the fourteen hundred acres of woodland, with a few cornfields and some log cabins in bad repair, and Gethsemani was sold to the Trappists for five thousand dollars.

  It was in October, 1848, that the colony was organized to leave the abbey of Melleray. At its head, Dom Maxime placed Father Eutropius Proust, a thirty-nine-year-old priest from the strongly Catholic Vendée district who had not yet been four years in the monastery. He had made profession in 1846, and the next year he had taken over Father Paulinus’s office as prior when the latter went on his expedition to Kentucky. He was a thin, wiry, intense little man, this Father Eutropius, He had a quick intelligence and a vivid, dramatic imagination. He was full of ideals, his heart burned with faith and zeal. And he had more courage than physical strength—a common trait among Trappists. He needed all the faith and ardor and enthusiasm and courage he could muster, to carry out the difficult and complicated mission that was entrusted to him. He was to lead forty-four men—monks, brothers, novices, postulants, and familiars—through a France that was once more simmering to the boiling-point with revolution; he was to put them on a boat and take them to America—fighting his way step by step through a most intricate network of obstacles and reverses.

  The number and character of the accidents that beset the monks all through their journey bear sufficient witness to the activity of the enemy of all such enterprises as this. The devil does not like monasteries, especially contemplative ones. He has spent a hundred years trying to interfere with Gethsemani—and in the early days the battle was not altogether to his disadvantage.

  However, most of the monks who sailed for the United States under Father Eutropius were perfectly chosen for the foundation. But for one or two exceptions—like Father Paulinus, a Basque, and the Italian Father Benezet—the colonists sent to Gethsemani were Bretons and Vendéens.

  That meant, first of all, that they were physically hardy, endowed with plenty of strength and endurance—racial characteristics of these sturdy and intrepid farmers and mariners. Of course, they were not prepared for the Kentucky climate, with its unmitigated summer heat and its sudden temperamental changes of warm and cold in the other seasons of the year. But on the whole they would be well equipped to stand up under the vicissitudes of the new foundation. Father Euthymius, who served many years as subprior, died in 1880 at the age of seventy-two, and Father Emmanuel, the cellarer, lived until 1885 and the age of seventy-four. Some of the lay brothers did even better. Brother Charles Potiron, who reputedly died in an aura of sanctity and mysticism, lived to be seventy-seven, and Brother Theodoret was buried in January, 1893, two months short of his eightieth birthday. Finally, Brother Antonine, who was only eighteen when he sailed from France with the rest of the Trappists as a novice, and who was so tempted against his vocation that he more than once left the monastery and returned to begin over again, outlasted them all and saw the golden jubilee of Gethsemani in 1898. He died in 1902, in his seventy-third year.

  On October 26, 1848, the monks of Melleray got up as usual for the night office, at two o’clock in the morning. It was over at about four, and those who had been designated for the American foundation went to the dormitory and changed into secular clothing, afterward putting on their cowls over the unfamiliar garb. Then they descended to the cloister with the two blankets that were their individual baggage and bedding for the long journey.

  Dom Maxime addressed them for the last time, in terms of which we may find an echo in the act of foundation of the abbey. “Our dearly beloved brothers,” he wrote, “will infallibly succeed if they always keep the spirit of their vocation, which will lead them in particular to the study and practice of the virtues of charity, obedience, poverty, mortification, patience, humility. Let our beloved brothers never forget to apply themselves to prayer . . . let them maintain close union among themselves. . . . Then the world and the devil will be able to do nothing against them, for, let them be fully persuaded of this truth: a house divided against itself will fall into ruins. Let them have a cordial and respectful love for their superior and console him in his cares for them by obedience and fraternal union, and let them never put him into the position where the duty of issuing his commands may become a matter of difficulty and embarrassment for him. Let them, in the consideration of their own frailties, remain humble in spirit and in their hearts. Do this and you shall live, my dearly beloved brothers. Amen! Amen!”

  The Trappists listened in silence, with lumps in their throats, then proceeded to the church for the traditional blessing that is chanted over “monks going on a journey.”

  After that, the whole community, those traveling and those staying in France, issued from the monastery gate in procession, chanting the litany of Loretto. It was a bleak autumn morning and rain was falling steadily. Father Eutropius, armed with a wooden cross that was a copy of the one with which Dom Augustin de Lestrange had once led his band of refugees from La Trappe to La Val Sainte, walked forward full of emotion into a gray, wet world of bare trees and stubble fields and puddles and deep mud. The procession continued its solemn progress, chanting in the rain for about a kilometer. At the edge of a wood they came to a small wayside cross. Here they stopped. The monks who were leaving took off their rain-soaked cowls and handed them to the ones who were staying. They all embraced one another in
silence, and the two groups parted, one to return to the abbey and the other—a strange band of workingmen with shaven heads and ill-fitting suits—to begin a long day’s tramp to the Loire, where they were to take a riverboat from Ancenis to Tours.

  That was how the monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani came into existence. That morning had seen what was technically the foundation of the new house. The community had been formed and had begun to exist and function as an autonomous unit from the moment of its separation from Melleray. Nevertheless, it still had several thousands of miles to go before it was to find the place of its destiny. For two months the community would be looking for its monastery.

  The first day’s journey ended dramatically at Ancenis, where the news of the monks’ embarkation had attracted a large crowd of curious and devout Vendéens. The Trappists chanted Compline and sang their ancient, heart-rending Salve Regina in the parish church, which was crowded to the doors. But when it came time to find their way through the crowds to the boat, they became separated in the darkness, and their superior had a hard time gathering them together again. When they were all finally safe on board, three real misfortunes were discovered. Their baggage had not been put on board at Nantes, as had been planned; their provisions had been mislaid somewhere between Melleray and the boat landing, and finally, a brother who had been sent to Nantes to borrow eight thousand francs had returned empty-handed.

  It was a wild journey from Ancenis to Le Havre. They changed from boat to train at Tours, changed trains at Orléans and again in Paris. Each stage of their journey was marked by excitement and confusion. Whenever this weird group of rough-looking men with shaven heads collected around their emaciated leader in station waiting rooms, crowds of curious people flocked from all sides, full of questions and comment. Since they could not get anything out of the monks, who refused to speak to them, the bystanders made their own peculiar surmises. Usually it ended with Father Eutropius making a little speech. “Messieurs,” he would say, “do not be alarmed or surprised. These are men dedicated to God, Trappist monks who have renounced everything to live in poverty and labor and silence and prayer. They are going to a distant land to build a monastery. They are going to carry the Name and the worship of God to the forests of North America, among the tigers1 and panthers and wolves of Kentucky. . . . ”

  Invariably the gendarmes were on the scene before he had uttered more than four or five sentences. All France was on the alert for riots in 1848. But the Trappists did not get into any trouble.

  What was more important, at each new stage of the journey Father Eutropius, with an untiring persistence born of faith married to natural tenacity, pushed and cajoled his way into the offices of the highest railway officials he could find, in order to beg huge reductions for the traveling monks. Thanks to his efforts, they went most of the way to Le Havre riding second-class and paying only half the third-class fare.

  For many of the monks it was the first time they had ever ridden in a train or had, indeed, even seen one. For most of them it was also their last experience of the ferocious chemin de fer.

  At Le Havre, three days before the departure of the boat, the brothers who had been told to bring the fifteen thousand pounds of baggage from Nantes to the port of embarkation arrived without any of it. They innocently presented to their superior the “written promise” which a nice gentleman at Tours had given them, stating that they would certainly have their baggage with them at Le Havre that same evening. Father Eutropius threw up his hands in a paroxysm of woe and took the first train back to Paris.

  He arrived at the capital at five the next morning—little more than forty-eight hours before their ship was due to weigh anchor. He inquired at three stations without finding a trace of the monks’ equipment—which included everything from ploughs and bake ovens to folio graduals and antiphoners and straw mattresses. It was not the kind of consignment that would easily be overlooked.

  Finally he found it all safe at the Gare d’lvry. But his troubles had only begun. He had to move this mountain across Paris to the Gare de Batignolles. This would cost much more than he could afford. Soon Father Eutropius was once again seated in the office of the highest and most influential official he could find.

  The Trappist abbot has left us a written account, in English, of all this. He says (with a pardonable disregard for syntax): “On telling him that I was a Trappist he appeared totally surprised, and wished to know the life of a Trappist. I gave him a short résumé of our manner of life. . . . I spoke to him of our spiritual exercises, of our different employments, and the happiness experienced in the quiet of solitude. He listened to me with great attention and when I had finished speaking he cried out: ‘Ah, Monsieur! That life is beautiful compared with that of the great part of men in the world where we see only sensuality, pride and self-love. I assure you that if I were not married I would embrace your kind of life and accompany you to America!’“2

  Father Eutropius Proust was a good talker!

  However, this particular official could do nothing to reduce the cost of transporting the monks’ baggage across Paris. He sent Father Eutropius off with a letter to another official who gave him just as little satisfaction. By that time it was getting late. In fact, it would soon be too late to move his baggage from the station where it was languishing. He managed to obtain special permission to do so.

  Seven o’clock in the evening found Father Eutropius hard at work with three teamsters, loading up wagons at the Gare d’lvry.

  Then there was the problem of the octroi, the city customs. If they went through Paris, they would be stopped and all their baggage held up for examination. It was now past nine.

  Father Eutropius promised his teamsters a good tip if they would go around the city walls. They agreed.

  For a terrible half-hour, however, the Trappist superior was tortured with misgivings about the wisdom of such a course. The teamsters pulled up at the first bistrot along their way and stopped in for a couple of drinks to give them strength for their journey.

  At ten o’clock he was wringing his hands in the street, standing in the lurid glare that issued from the bar and illuminated the heavy wagons and idle horses.

  But in the end everything arrived safely at Batignolles and left on the early train for Le Havre.

  At one in the afternoon of November 2, 1848, the forty Trappists and their books and ploughs and supplies for the long Atlantic crossing were safe on board the “Brunswick,” an eight-hundred-ton sailing vessel under the command of Captain Thomas of New Orleans.

  The ship was crowded. It was the year of the gold rush, and America was more than ever fabulous in the imagination of immigrants. But on this journey the “Brunswick” was bearing a company unusual even in those years. Besides the Trappists themselves, who barricaded themselves off in the steerage and settled in a provisional shipboard monastery to which nobody else had access without their permission, and besides sixty German immigrants of the ordinary kind, there was a party of eighty men, women, and children destined for one of the strange communist “utopias” that were springing up in such profusion in those years.

  1848 was the year when the Oneida community was founded. Seven years before, Brook Farm had entered upon the same path of social experimentation. There were not a few Fourieristic phalanxes in the United States, and it was more than twenty years since the English Socialist, Robert Owen, had inaugurated his community at New Harmony, Indiana—a dream of harmony that had been shipwrecked within two years upon the rocks of the same old discord.

  By 1848 there was ample evidence that the only ones among these communist groups that stood a fair chance of survival were those that had some kind of religious basis. The Shakers were still flourishing. The Ephrata community, founded in Pennsylvania by a German Protestant hermit more than a century before, was still thriving and continued to do so for many years to come.

  The group that sailed from Le Havre at the end of 1848 with the Trappist founders of Gethsemani was destined to be
the longest-lived of the explicitly nonreligious communist “utopias” planted on American soil in those optimistic days.

  They were Etienne Cabet’s “Icarians.” The first thing that Dom Eutropius remarked about them was that they were under the direction of a delegate who took the place of Cabet himself, and “to whom the name of representative was given. He was charged with judging the differences that might arise among them, an office of which there was great need during the voyage.” 3 In fact, the Icarians were so divided by quarrels and dissensions arising from petty greeds and jealousies that the monks considered themselves fortunate to be separated, by the improvised enclosure, from all communion with their noise.

  One of the many things that distinguished the Trappists from the rest of that ship’s strange company was the relative efficiency with which they were prepared to meet the emergencies of the voyage. The other passengers, Icarians included, were fasting on hardtack, while the monks had set up their ovens and were drawing out smoking loaves of fresh bread each morning. Caldrons of soup simmered on the ranges of the monks’ kitchen, and under the circumstances the lean Trappist fare began to look like luxury indeed in those days before the phenomenal menus of the modern ocean liner.

  In a short time the monks found themselves feeding most of the other passengers—at least, all who were sick or weak or needed some special attention. The chief beneficiaries of this charity were some mothers with infants to nurse and an old immigrant who had been left by his companions to starve when he became too weak to prepare his own meals.

  The monks had no trouble with the Icarians, whose only hostile act was a decree of their “assembly” forbidding any of their number to hear Mass in the monks’ chapel. The Trappists were glad to do some cooking for them on their range, baking pastry, apples, potatoes, and so on for anyone who brought them to the door of the steerage “monastery.”