The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  In the very first week after their arrival, Father Eutropius was struck down with pneumonia—probably a result of the rainy ride from Louisville to Bardstown and the cold weather that followed—and in a short time he was in real danger of death. Two doctors were called in, and they said that his case was hopeless. They told the prior, Father Paulinus, to give him the Last Sacraments.

  As if this were not enough of a blow to the community, three of the weaker members left. One of them was a lay-brother postulant, who was entitled to go whenever he pleased. That was not so bad. But another was a professed choir monk—who apparently received a dispensation from his vows and returned to the world. The third was a professed lay brother. The only notation that follows his name in the very imperfect archives of the abbey is terrible in its brevity: Mort cL Louisville, apostat (“He died in Louisville, an apostate”).

  Nevertheless, the majority of the monks were determined to stay in Kentucky and make a success of this foundation, no matter what the cost might be. So great was their resolution to carry out what they were convinced to be God’s will for them that Father Paulinus, acting as superior during the sickness of Father Eutropius, made a contract for two thousand bricks to be burned and delivered to Gethsemani in the spring of 1849. The monks were ready to begin their permanent building at once.

  Meanwhile, the saintly Bishop Flaget of Louisville, who was himself entering upon what was to be his last sickness, offered the last nine Masses of his life as a novena for the recovery of the Trappist superior. Bishop Flaget was too weak to go to the cathedral, and he said the Masses in his room.

  Father Eutropius was lying unconscious in his bed at Gethsemani. The doctor who had come to visit him for what he thought was the last time exclaimed: “It is all over. He has only five minutes to live.” He mounted his horse to continue on his rounds and help those who might possibly profit by his services. He had scarcely left the cabin when the patient opened his eyes. Father Eutropius had recovered consciousness, and he felt such a marked improvement that he thanked God for having cured him.

  However, it was long before he had any real strength. In fact, his ardent love of the common life led him into imprudences that put off his real recovery for many months. He insisted on going out to work with the monks before he was sufficiently strong to swing an axe or wield a shovel, and soon he was once again in bed. His convalescence lasted until July. In the spring months he could do little else but ride through the woods on horseback, with Father Paulinus to look after him.

  On April 8 there came some small consolation for the monks in the log-cabin monastery, when two of those who had crossed the Atlantic from Melleray as novices pronounced the vows that made them permanent members of the community, promising “obedience, conversion of manners and stability1 in this place which is called Our Lady of Gethsemani, before God and in the presence of His saints whose relics are here present. . . . ”

  Still, Father Eutropius was by no means convinced that the foundation would last, and one of his first acts on recovering his health was to cancel Father Paulinus’s order for two thousand bricks. After all, they had no money with which to pay the Sisters of Loretto for the land, still less to buy bricks.

  This fact so preyed on the mind of the young superior that he felt it was absolutely essential for him to return to France to raise money for the monastery. The doctors told him that the journey was out of the question, but he started out, anyway, on the Fourth of July, 1849. He was so weak that it took two brothers to get him into the carriage that was to take him to Bardstown. He had to spend several weeks resting in Louisville, as the guest of Bishop Flaget. From there he went on by easy stages to Cincinnati and New York and finally sailed for Europe.

  Although there was no question that the monks needed money, the necessity of such a journey was most unfortunate, since it deprived the community of its superior. It was not the only journey of that kind that Dom Eutropius made when he was abbot of Gethsemani. Later on, when building actually began, other monks of the community, including Father Paulinus, spent months outside the enclosure and traveled many miles trying to raise money to pay for the abbey buildings, whose walls were slowly rising on the knoll above the little creek that ran through the woods of Gethsemani. We find one of the monks as far afield as Montevideo, Uruguay, where he finally became involved in the secular ministry.

  These long tours, extending over entire continents, were scarcely in harmony with the Cistercian vocation to silence, stability, and contemplation. There is evidence that the General Chapters viewed them with great disfavor in those days, when begging was still not a violation of the letter of the Rules. (AH begging by the monks themselves is forbidden by the present Constitutions of the Order.)

  Dom Eutropius, however, had the approval of the Papal Nuncio in the United States.

  Even more helpful to the new community than the money collected on these tours were the postulants who presented themselves at the log-cabin monastery. Considering the hardships and poverty of the life, Gethsemani did rather well in attracting vocations in the first year of its existence. During the course of 1849, fourteen men came, at one time or another, to ask the habit of a Trappist novice—nine in the choir and the rest as brothers. Most of them were Irishmen or Germans. There was one Kentuckian, and he turned out to be consumptive and could not stay. Those who applied to become choir novices were mostly priests, and some of them belonged to other religious congregations.

  Of the fourteen, four remained to make their vows together on Easter Sunday, April 20, 1851. Meanwhile, a new colony of thirteen priests, monks, novices, and brothers arrived from Melleray. Two of these novices, both priests, also pronounced their vows on that Easter Sunday. They were joined by a novice who had come to Gethsemani with the original pioneers from France, a vigorous and severe middle-aged Breton. He was called Frater Mary Benedict.

  Easter Sunday, 1851, must have inspired high hopes at Gethsemani. First, in the chapter room, two lay brothers, Sebastian and Frederick, made their perpetual vows. Then, at the solemn Mass in the monastery chapel no fewer than eight choir monks, three of whom were priests, sang their irrevocable suscipe.

  They were a curious and interesting group, these men. Most of them were Bretons and had already been formed to the Cistercian life in France. One of them, Frater Theophilus, was a professed monk from the abbey of Aiguebelle, who was only renewing his stability at Gethsemani. Three of them, professed under the names of Fraters Peter, Paul, and Patrick, were all Irish-born and were, so to speak, Gethsemani’s own. They had never known any other but the log-cabin monastery. Frater Peter Bannon lived to be seventy-five and died forty-two years later, in 1893, but Frater Patrick Mills survived his profession only two months. As for Frater Paul, whose family name was Murphy, he did not die in the monastery. After his name in the archives there is a laconic note that speaks heaven only knows what volumes of nostalgia. It says, Parti pour l’lrlande (“He went back to Ireland”).

  But Frater Benedict was by far the most important member of the group who made their vows that Easter Sunday. He had graduated from college with the highest honors and had proceeded to take a seminary course in theology, but had then drawn back from the priesthood, feeling that it was an honor too far above him. The responsibilities brought terror to his austere and rigid soul.

  He became a teacher, but life in the world could not give him peace. He turned to the Trappists. At the monastery of Melleray he found what satisfied his soul—a life of rigid, unrelenting penance, of silence, obedience, humiliations. In this powerful and unbending character there was a kind of thirst for humiliations; the ideal of De Rancé was his element. He would have reveled in the chapter of faults in the golden days of La Grande Trappe.

  That was what sanctity meant to Father Benedict Berger: the ability to receive outrageous insults, to be cursed, reviled, slapped in the face, spat upon, without twitching an eyebrow. That was the formula for his own sanctification, and that was to be his formula for the sanctific
ation of others when he became abbot of Gethsemani.

  But we are getting ahead of our story.

  Gethsemani became an abbey2 very early in her history—long before she was out of her log cabins and into the new brick monastery. Father Eutropius’s begging tour of 1849 took him to Rome, where he was received in audience by Pope Pius IX. It was as a result of this visit that Gethsemani was erected in 1851 into an abbey. It was the “proto-abbey” of the New World, an abstract distinction that seems to mean more than it actually does. All it really signifies is that the superiors of the monasteries that had been founded in America before Gethsemani, had not thought of going through all the red tape necessary to have their houses raised to this formal position.

  In October, 1851, following an election held in May, the first abbot was blessed in old St. Joseph’s Cathedral, Bardstown. The first abbot was, of course, Dom Mary Eutropius Proust.

  Dom Eutropius had by that time a community of sixty men, and it was high time to begin the permanent monastery. The building was laid out on a scale that surprised those who saw it. Many thought that Dom Eutropius was foolish to build so spacious a church, so large a monastery. The place would be twice as big as he needed. True, postulants were coming; but postulants were also leaving, and novices too, and even some of the professed, some of those who had come from France in the first colony: their health failed, or their hearts, and they got dispensations or managed to be sent home to the mother house. Was it wise to build a place that could house a hundred and fifty men?

  But this time Dom Eutropius was really inspired by the Holy Ghost, as we who have come a hundred years later have had ample opportunity to discover. With a community of a hundred and seventy, we have sometimes wondered why Dom Eutropius made the place so small.

  However, the pioneer abbot had another inspiration, perhaps not such a good one. Determined to pay off all his debts, he decided to start a school. A school was needed at that time and in that place. Besides, it was a sure way of cementing the good will that bound the monks and their neighbors, both Catholic and Protestant, in all that section of Kentucky.

  For a long time this school was more a project than an accomplished fact. Those were the Civil War years. Things were too unsettled for a boys’ school in those days, when most young Kentuckians were running off to fight on one side or the other. Besides, the monks were too busy with the vitally important work of building their permanent monastery and making their own living out of the poor land to think of educating the young. As a matter of fact, it was a good thing they did apply themselves so wholeheartedly to what was strictly their own business. Within twenty years of their foundation all the essentials of a complete Cistercian monastery were permanently and solidly built. It was an immense advantage to be able to move into new quarters and keep the Rule in its entirety, from day to day, without any of the weird makeshifts that impose themselves on monks who do not have a real monastery to live in.

  Probably this stubborn determination to build a monastery and occupy it as soon as possible finally decided the survival of the Gethsemani community, for, all this time, the fate of the house was hanging in the balance. The father immediate and the General Chapter seem several times to have almost reached the point of calling the whole thing off. But those Breton fathers who had come over to America on the “Brunswick” in 1848 had made up their minds to strike deep roots into the soul of Kentucky, and they were not going to allow themselves to be transplanted any more. The history of Dom Urban Guillet’s colony would not be repeated, if they had anything to say in the matter.

  The monastery building reflects their state of mind. It is a massive, quadrangular structure without pretension to any special architectural grace. The walls are thick and solid, and it is built around a central cloister garth or préau, according to the traditional Cistercian plan. The only attempt at “style” is in the church itself, and there the touch of Gothic Revival is so modest and self-effacing that it is not altogether alien to the Cistercian spirit of simplicity.

  The monks of Gethsemani have their poverty to thank for the fact that their monastery has none of the ornate and pretentious ugliness, none of the ponderous vulgarity, that makes most of the architecture of the period so oppressive. True, it would be hard for the buildings to lay claim to any positive beauty, yet this negative freedom from pastiche is a matter for congratulation. To give the place its due, the view of Gethsemani’s south front from St. Joseph’s Hill is full of real dignity and charm, especially when it is surrounded by the flowers and foliage of summer.

  Another thing that clearly reflects the spirit of the founders of Gethsemani was their reaction to Dom Eutropius’s resignation. The health of the “proto-abbot” had always been very shaky, and one feels that his confidence in Gethsemani had never been altogether solid. He spent much of his time traveling to raise money, and he could never see the way clear to complete financial security. Finally, he decided that the responsibility was too great for him, and he laid it down to return to Melleray. That was in 1860. Eight years later he was elected abbot of the ancient Cistercian monastery of Tre Fontane, built on the site of St. Paul’s martyrdom in the Roman Campagna.

  One might have expected the community at Gethsemani to elect Father Paulinus as his successor. After all, Father Paulinus had been prior of the mother house when Dom Eutropius had been no more than a novice, and he had more years of monastic experience behind him than most of the community. But there was one thing against him: he had spent too many months, years even, outside the monastery raising funds.

  We can see what was the mentality of the monks of Gethsemani by their actual choice. They did not want a promoter, a businessman, at their head, even though he might also be a good Trappist. They were not concerned about money and financial security before everything else.

  Their choice fell upon the austere Breton who had been one of the first to make his vows at the monastery. In electing Dom Benedict Berger, the monks of Gethsemani were fully aware of what kind of abbot they were going to have. They knew what that Napoleonic chin and those steely eyes represented. But they wanted this strict, uncompromising disciplinarian because they knew that he would be a ruthless defender of the rigor of the Rule. Perhaps he would be a hard superior; but one feels that most of the monks were all the happier for it. They were Trappists.

  But beyond their concern for the welfare of their own individual souls, they were thinking of the survival of the monastery and of the Cistercian life in Kentucky. For that, it was all important that Gethsemani should have an abbot who would devote his whole life to maintaining the Benedictine regime of prayer, manual labor, and contemplative reading, together with the fasting and poverty and austerity and penance and monastic obedience in all their original purity.

  Dom Benedict Berger ruled the monastery for twenty-nine years. And he really ruled it. He stayed with his monks and kept his finger on everything that went on. The new abbot rarely traveled, although we find him attending the two plenary councils of Baltimore besides making several visits to France and Nova Scotia on business for the Order.

  During those twenty-nine years Gethsemani became a by-word in Kentucky and in the American Catholic Church. It acquired a very definite character and spirit and reputation of its own—not altogether a pleasant one to most minds, it is true. All this was the effect of Dom Benedict and his regime.

  The Gethsemani of the nineteenth century came to represent everything that La Trappe had been standing for since De Rancé. It was a place that people at large, even Catholics, were afraid of. Many shivered when they passed it. The monks were not understood. In the first place they were foreigners. Then they led that atrocious life of penance! The belief that most of them were reformed criminals gained authority in most minds from the fact that the guest house of the monastery usually had a quota of fallen priests entrusted to the monks for a period of ecclesiastical penance. The atmosphere of Gethsemani was well calculated to get most of them back into shape to perform their duties cons
cientiously—it was so forcible a reminder of purgatory!

  Finally, the whole community was judged in terms of its abbot, and Dom Benedict’s relations with the outside world—especially with the chancery office in Louisville—were characterized by the same unbending severity, the same dictatorial attitude, that he assumed among his monks.

  The exiled French monks were thus all the more isolated, even though their school was now receiving students and making friends who were capable of understanding the monastery and what it really stood for.

  Nevertheless, it must have required a very special kind of heroism to live through those twenty-nine years of very hard labor and real poverty, under an abbot whose deliberate policy was to insult and humiliate his monks at every turn. And there were many other discouraging factors in the life. If the monks had had plenty of good books to read, it might have made a big difference, at least to some of them. But they had very little besides conventional books of piety—some of which require almost a special charism unto themselves if they are to be absorbed without twisting the mind into a caricature of sanctity.

  The monks had none of the consolation that comes from a novitiate full of good prospects, with postulants coming in every other week. The postulants who came to Gethsemani were few, and the archives show that they practically all left. Dom Benedict took the Rule very seriously in its prescriptions about testing the novices to see if they loved humiliations.