Walled in, then, in this big, isolated fortress of silence, the Breton fathers who had come from Melleray had absolutely nothing to fall back on except a deep interior life. Everything else was literally annihilated. It was God or nothing. And we have reason to believe that for most of them it was God. They had to be saints; otherwise they would have gone crazy.
Of course, the big problem of the house was always its survival. A monastery cannot go on without vocations. And what was most important of all, what would eventually decide Gethsemani’s fate, would be its ability to attract and hold American vocations. It was not enough that a passing Irishman or Frenchman or German should decide to end his wanderings at Gethsemani; what the monks needed was some evidence that the Cistercian life was capable of capturing the minds and hearts of these adventurous and independent Americans in whose country they had planted their foundation.
In the first days at Gethsemani the excitement caused by the monks’ presence in the neighborhood brought them a postulant, a young Kentuckian who wanted to be a lay brother but who had to be sent away because he had consumption. That was in 1849. Not until four more years had passed did another American-born postulant appear. In 1853 a twenty-three-year-old farm boy from New York State applied to the lay brothers’ novitiate. Brother John, as he was called, survived the novitiate and made his simple perpetual vows in 1855. This showed that an American could come along at least that far in the Cistercian life. Brother John lasted fourteen years; in 1869 he received a dispensation and returned to the world.
During all these fourteen years there were only two other American-born postulants. One, Brother Lawrence, had been a tax collector, and his stay of one year proved him to be true to the tax collector’s professional reputation for hardheartedness. He spent most of his time trying to argue with Dom Eutropius and crowned his monastic career with a twelve-page document full of close-packed invective which the records of the house describe as “diabolical.” With this parting shot, he walked out the front gate never to return, and the monks all heaved sighs of relief.
In 1868, exactly twenty years after the foundation, Gethsemani opened her doors to her first American-born postulant for the choir. He was a secular priest, and he made two attempts to become a Trappist at Gethsemani. The first time, he stayed a year and left. He returned in 1881, to spend almost the whole two years’ novitiate, but when the time came to take his vows, he fled.
Then Gethsemani acquired another Brother John—from Alabama—in 1876. He made his vows but was afterward dispensed. He stayed on a short time as a family brother, that is, a kind of farm hand living in the gatehouse and working for bed and board, but he soon left altogether. The same year, another secular priest, this time from Brooklyn, came and gave the life a four-month trial. In 1878 there was another postulant for the lay brotherhood; he left in the same year.
Among the American postulants who thought of becoming Trappists at Gethsemani during Dom Benedict’s administration, the most colorful, by far, was a certain Joseph Dutton. Recently converted to the faith, this man had led the kind of life that legend generally tacks on to Trappists. Born of Protestant farmers in Vermont, he had fought in the Union army in the Civil War. He had been unhappily married, then divorced. After that, he had gone through years of misery, drinking and gambling and ruining his life altogether. In the early 1880’s he turned up in Memphis, where his reputation earned him, strangely enough, a romantic popularity. With a view to marrying the daughter of a Catholic family in that city, he had begun to take instructions in the faith. Then, soon after his Baptism, he suddenly vanished. Word came back that he had entered Gethsemani.
He remained in the monastery for twenty months. One day, toward the end of his novitiate, he was mowing hay in St. Mary’s field, in front of the abbey, when a runaway horse came galloping down the road. The rider, a young girl, fell off as the horse went by. He picked her up and carried her to the monks’ school. When he left the monastery a few months later, the rumor went around that he had gone off to marry her.
This story seems to have given the popular Kentucky novelist, James Lane Allen, the theme for his story about Gethsemani. The White Cowl has always rather annoyed the monks. There is supposed to be a copy of it around the monastery somewhere, but nobody seems to know where it is, and practically nobody has read it. But the mere thought of the book’s theme (which is also that of the Marlene Dietrich movie, “Garden of Allah”) irritates them: so much so that, when we thought of borrowing a copy from the outside, in the hope that it would furnish an amusing page for the present volume, Dom Frederic Dunne, our late abbot, refused permission, saying he “didn’t want people to think we had any interest in the thing.”
In reality, Dutton left Gethsemani for a very solid reason. The monks, who were accustomed to write remarks in the record of entries and departures, seldom had any admiration for those who left. There is only one exception—Joseph Dutton. He went off to join the heroic Father Damien in his leper colony at Molokai, in the Pacific. It turned out that this was his real vocation. He became the close friend and one of the chief supports of the leper-priest and lived on Molokai for forty-four years—until he was well over eighty. It was a life of much harsher and more terrible penances than anything known at Gethsemani, even under Dom Benedict Berger.
Gethsemani had now been in existence thirty years. It was a fully developed Cistercian community, with a complete monastery and all that was needed to lead the Trappist life in all its details. The pioneer stage had long since been left behind. Those who entered the monastery found all the essentials of the contemplative life that had been led by St. Bernard and the Cistercian mystics of the twelfth century, except for the special spiritual atmosphere and the vital doctrine that pervaded St. Bernard’s Clairvaux. Apart from that, they found the same rule, the same kind of life, the same opportunities. But they did not want them. They could not appreciate what they were getting. They could not penetrate beneath the surface of hardships and exterior humiliations to find the inner unction that came with the cross of the ascetic.
In thirty years there had been only eight native Americans at Gethsemani, and they had all run away. Was it true, what they were saying in Europe, that Americans would never make contemplatives? If so, that meant the end of Gethsemani, because the original founders were old men now, and the cemetery behind the apse of the church was beginning to be dotted with gray crosses and green graves bedded in myrtle.
Irish and German and French and French-Canadian novices came from time to time, and enough of them made profession to keep the house going until this, its greatest problem, was finally solved. And some of these had sufficient heroism to make up for what was lacking in those who did not stay.
For instance, there was Father Henry. He is still remembered in Gethsemani and in the neighborhood, for he died in 1919, after many years as confessor to the retreatants in the guest house. Father Henry was a German from Westphalia. He entered Gethsemani as a secular priest. During his novitiate he went blind. This would have been a very good reason for leaving the monastery, but Father Henry did not leave. He made his solemn vows and bound himself to spend the rest of his life in the poverty and obedience and enclosure and silence of a Cistercian—as well as in the perpetual darkness which God had added to his burden for good measure. He knew the psalter by heart, and he not only could say Mass, reciting the Masses of Our Lady and of the Dead by heart, but he even sang the conventual Masses when his turn came as hebdomadary. All he needed was to have someone read the proper of the Mass over to him a few times before he went to the altar. His inability to see anything with the eyes of his body did not impair the inward vision of his soul, but even that was obscured, toward the end of his life, by one of those nameless and dreadful trials with which the Spirit of God visits and purifies the souls of contemplatives. Father Henry accepted that also in the same spirit of peace and resignation with which he took all his other afflictions.
But long before that time, things had changed,
and Gethsemani’s survival was assured.
Nobody realized it at the time, but the turning-point came in 1885, when a young man who had been born on a farm near Lebanon, in the next county, confronted the ageing Dom Benedict and asked for admission to the lay brothers’ novidate. His name was John Green Hanning, and they put him down as a farmer. That was true; he had just come from his father’s tobacco plantation near Owensboro, Kentucky. But when his superiors came to know this bronzed and wiry and laconic man a little better, they found that he had led rather an unsettled, wandering life. He had received the beginnings of an education from the monks themselves at their school on St. Joseph’s Hill, but then he had run away from home to become a cowboy in Texas.
It was strange that the first native American to make a complete success of the Trappist life at Gethsemani should be a Texas cowboy. The ten-gallon hat and the lariat and the pair of six-shooters and the high saddle horns of the broncobuster have always symbolized the ultimate in American independence, and this tan and taciturn stranger, who took the name of Brother Joachim when he joined the monks, was no exception to the rule. He was independent and he was wild.
One would think he was absolutely the worst kind of candidate for the formation that Dom Benedict Berger believed in, and the truth is that the abbot’s attempts to humiliate this ex-cowboy were met with explosions more proper to the wild west than to De Ranch’s La Trappe. In a way, this Brother Joachim was the most unpromising of all the foot-loose wanderers who had stayed a while at Gethsemani to give the life a trial.
Yet, he turned out, after all, to be the very best—so true is it that it is the Holy Ghost Who makes religious vocations and sometimes makes the best of them out of the least likely material.
Brother Joachim had many natural qualities that fitted him to be a Trappist brother. He was strong. He could work. And although for a good part of his life he had not lived as a Catholic, there was a predisposition to solitude, a natural foundation for the contemplative life, something he had acquired in those long, lonely rides on the range. But above all, he was sincere and already had much of the natural humility of men who have been too often beaten down by a dominant passion—of men who know their own weakness.
That, after all, is the most important qualification in a postulant to the Cistercian life: a sense of the need of grace, of God’s help, of the strict Rule, of solitude and silence and prayer. Without that, no one will really come to the monastery “seeking God,” which is the first requirement St. Benedict demands in a novice.
The transformation worked by grace in the soul of this cowboy during his twenty-three years at Gethsemani was so remarkable that it has become the subject of a book that has gone through twelve American editions and is being translated Into many other languages.3 Brother Joachim has become famous with more than the fame of a merely human heroism. Catholics have prayed to God for favors through his intercession and have been answered. One of the first things many visitors to Gethsemani ask to see is his grave.
But long before all this came about, it was already evident that the entrance of John Green Hanning into the lay brothers’ novitiate marked the beginning of a new age for Gethsemani. Indeed, his name is the first of a long list of native Americans who entered the monastery and took the Rule and all its hardships and embraced them for the love of God and stayed until the end. He was the first of a new generation that did not completely pass away until 1939, when little Brother Aloysius, the ex-Pennsylvania coal miner who came to Gethsemani two years after Brother Joachim, was laid to rest in the shadow of the monastic church.
The first native American to persevere at Gethsemani as a Cistercian choir monk was a young man of twenty who came to the Trappists from Atlanta, Georgia, in the summer of 1894, received the habit, and settled down quietly to lead the Cistercian life in all its rigor. He went on leading it for well over fifty years; for thirteen of them he was abbot of the monastery, the first American to become a Trappist abbot: Dom M. Frederic Dunne.
While Gethsemani had been working out the all-important problems of survival, two other famous Cistercian monasteries of the Strict Observance had been founded on the North American continent. The first was a cousin of the Kentucky monastery, only a year younger than Melleray’s second daughter. Indeed, it was only a few months since the Breton Trappists had moved into the log cabins they had bought from the Sisters of Loretto, when a priest presented himself at their gate and introduced himself as a monk of Mount Melleray in Ireland. Father Bernard McCaffrey was his name, and he had been sent to the United States to find a site for a new foundation. It turned out that Mount Melleray had several of these scouts scattered around in America looking for a building site, and in the summer of 1849 the abbot himself, Dom Bruno Fitzpatrick, disembarked on American soil with the same end in view.
He boldly advanced farther west than any other Trappist, planted a foundation stone on some land that had been offered him by the Bishop of Dubuque and said, “Here is where we will build.”
So, in 1849 the Cistercians had a monastery west of the Mississippi. Not that the community was formed, nor that the buildings sprang out of the ground overnight. Our Lady of New Melleray had a slow and painful growth—building on a foundation of poverty and sacrifice.
The first colony of two priests and four brothers needed reinforcements and needed them badly. So, a party of sixteen sailed from Ireland in the fall of 1849. But they had a fateful journey which ended, for six of them, long before they reached the rolling plains of Iowa.
They had set out from New Orleans with four hundred other passengers on a river steamer bound for St. Louis. But when the steamer reached its destination, there were only sixty passengers left. An epidemic of cholera had broken out on board, and twenty-six had died. The rest had got off the boat at the earliest possible opportunity. Of the twenty-six victims, six were Trappists—three buried in Mississippi, one in Tennessee, and two in Missouri. The first to go had been Brother John Evangelist. Brother Patrick, who had helped bury him, came back on board and said drily to his superior: “I have the cholera since morning.” With this, he collapsed, and in a few hours he was dead too. They buried him a little way up the river, on the following morning.
But in the general panic and despair of the passengers, the calm and peace of the Trappist monks was so impressive that by the time they reached their moorings in St. Louis the silence of the Cistercians was preaching louder than any number of sermons—far louder than the enthusiastic Father Joseph Dunand had ever done in that same city, nearly half a century before. One of the fruits of this silent sermon was the conversion of the river steamer’s captain, who went off and got himself baptized.
In a few months this same captain was able to point out the crosses that marked the graves of the buried Trappists to another party of monks from Mount Melleray who were on their way to Iowa.
The monks built themselves a frame church and started a parish for the local Catholic farmers. As a matter of fact, New Melleray was destined to play an even more active and important part in the development of Catholicity in the American Northwest than Gethsemani had ever done in the South. The Iowa Trappists gave two bishops to the Catholic hierarchy in the nineteenth century. Father Clement Smyth, the first permanent superior of the new community, was chosen as Coadjutor Bishop of Dubuque in 1856 and later became bishop of the diocese. Meanwhile, his successor at New Melleray was also raised to the episcopacy. Father James O’Gorman, who had led the famous colony through the cholera epidemic, became Bishop of Raphanea and Vicar Apostolic of Nebraska in 1859.
In 1863 New Melleray became an abbey, and four years later the monks began to build their permanent quarters—two wings of a not unattractive monastery of limestone. They had the good fortune to have a lay brother in the community who had worked under the architect Pugin; thanks to him, the north wing of New Melleray is a tolerably good example of Gothic Revival.
This much of the work was completed in three years, but a series of unfortunate acc
idents kept the monks from moving in until 1875. By that time New Melleray was going through one of the greatest storms of a stormy history. But for the generous financial assistance of good friends, they might have gone under altogether.
Fortunately for the Order, they survived and went on into the twentieth century under Dom Alberic Dunlea. At his death in 1917 the abbey entered upon another crisis and was only saved from extinction by Dom Bruno Ryan, who summoned the help of volunteers from the Irish monasteries of Mount Melleray and Mount St. Joseph. One of the volunteers, Dom Eugene Martin, a priest from the latter monastery, is today abbot of New Melleray, which is now compelled to expand by the press of vocations and is prospering more than ever before in its long history.
Finally, although it would be beyond the limits of this book to go into a detailed history of the six Cistercian monasteries and convents in Canada, this chapter would not be complete if we said nothing about the well-known abbey of Notre Dame du Lac on the shore of the Lac des Deux Montagnes, close to Montreal.
Like most of the other North American foundations, this new Cistercian monastery was born of French persecution. This time, the mother house was Dom Urban Guillet’s Bellefontaine. On the morning of November 6, 1880, citizen Assiot, the prefect of the Department of Maine and Loire, and two other government officials put on their top hats and adjusted their pince-nez and started out for the abbey of Bellefon taine at the head of five hundred soldiers and six brigades of gendarmes. They had reason to start out early: it was to be a long, busy morning.
The invaders drew themselves up before the monastery, where the monks, expecting their arrival, had been joined by the Bishop of Angers, who also happened to be a member of the Chamber of Deputies. This complicated matters, no doubt. But citizen Assiot and his gendarmes proceeded to summon the monks, with all the dusty formality of French legal terminology, to vacate the premises peacefully unless they wished to be put out by force. For some reason it took them from six o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon to say all this, since the bishop and the Trappists had a few things to say in reply. Finally, it became clear that the monks would leave only under duress, so they were escorted out of the monastery one by one, dragged by soldiers and policemen who were at the same time trying to preserve some clumsy appearance of dignity and self-respect.
The Waters of Siloe Page 17