Only a few miles from Calvary is another Cistercian house, dedicated to one of the glorious mysteries: Our Lady of the Assumption. It was founded the year after Calvary, 1903. In fact, two new Canadian Cistercian houses were founded in 1903: Our Lady of the Assumption in Acadia and Our Lady of Good Counsel in the Province of Quebec.
Both houses have something very special to recommend them to our interest: they were the first two American convents of Trappistine nuns.
St. Stephen Harding and the early fathers of the Order were at first unwilling to undertake the direction of religious communities of women. That was part of their reaction against the whole scheme of things in contemporary Benedictine monasticism: they wanted to get away from all the cares and responsibilities of the active ministry in order to live for God alone and for His immediate service. However, it was impossible to exclude women altogether from the Cistercian life. Soon a colony of Benedictine nuns from the convent of Jully, near Dijon, founded the convent of Notre Dame de Tart, in the same neighborhood. They were determined to keep the Rule of St. Benedict to the letter, like the monks of nearby Cîteaux, who took them under their protection. From Tart, founded in 1132, arose a magnificent family of convents that was to be one of the glories of medieval Europe. So rapid and widespread was the expansion of the order of Cistercian nuns that in 1228 the General Chapter, meeting at Cîteaux, repented to some extent of having taken on such a responsibility and decreed that no more convents of women would be officially accepted into the Cistercian Order. It is estimated that some nine hundred convents of nuns were under the jurisdiction of the General Chapter, although no one can say for certain how many there were, and this figure is probably too high. But besides them, there were many other houses of nuns who followed the Cistercian usages without the Order’s accepting any responsibility for their guidance or direction. Among these houses was the convent of Helfta in Saxony, the cloister where St. Gertrude the Great, St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn, and Mechtilde of Magdeburg all lived in the thirteenth century.
The Cistercian nuns declined with the rest of the Order, and there was no De Rancé to revive them. The first Trappistines owed their existence to Dom Augustin de Lestrange, who founded a convent in Switzerland in 1796 to accommodate refugee nuns from different orders who wanted not only a refuge but a strict Rule. La Sainte Volonté de Dieu (the Holy Will of God) was the name of this motherhouse of all Trappistine convents, and those who dwelt there had seen the Reign of Terror in France. Therefore, they embraced all the austerities of the Val Sainte reform with great good will and found profound consolations in an asceticism as fierce as that of the monks of the Holy Valley, for they desired to offer God some reparation for the crimes that had filled their land with blood.
Of all these daughters of Dom Augustin de Lestrange there was no one who more completely absorbed his spirit of penance than his namesake, Mother Augustin de Chabannes. This nun, professed before the Revolution at the Cistercian monastery of Saint-Antoine des Champs, outside Paris, had been arrested with many of her sisters in religion and imprisoned under the Reign of Terror. Condemned to the guillotine, she was waiting to lay down her life for her faith when the doors of the prison were thrown open. Robespierre had fallen, and she took advantage of the momentary lull in the persecution of Catholics to make for the frontier. She joined Dom Augustin and his Trappistines and crossed the channel to England in 1801. There, accompanied by three other professed nuns and five novices, she founded the first Trappistine community to survive until our own day. Our Lady of the Holy Cross, at Stapehill, Dorset, remains, after nearly one hundred and fifty years, to bear witness to the energetic faith of Madame de Chabannes. Like their neighbors, the Trappist monks of Lulworth, the nuns at Stapehill had to weather many storms in the early nineteenth century. The monks had to flee to France, but the nuns still are there.2
One of the foundations of La Val Sainte was La Riedra, and from La Riedra indirectly stemmed a convent in Vaise, a suburb of Lyons, called Our Lady of All Consolation. The date of that foundation was 1816, after the exile of Napoleon.
It was to Vaise that Dom Augustin de Lestrange came one summer day in 1827. The aged abbot, exhausted by years of strenuous labor and penance, had just traveled up the hot Rhone Valley, in spite of a serious accident at the shrine of La Baume, down near the shore of the MediterRancan. But when he got to Lyons he could go no further. Confined to a sickbed in the guest quarters of the Trappistine convent at Vaise, he realized that he had at last reached the end of his labyrinthine journeys. His last official act as Father of the Order was to address the nuns, speaking to them out of a window that overlooked a garden within the enclosure. There was something a little pathetic about the speech, because Dom Augustin himself realized that his reform was not going to last in all the strictness he gave to it. He foretold that they would be deprived of their greatest austerities and would have to go back to keeping the Rule as it had been kept by the fathers of Cîteaux (which certainly ought to be enough for anybody!). But he urged them to make up for it by greater obedience and humility. He died the following day, the feast of the founder of the Order, St. Stephen Harding, July 16, 1827.
Vaise was faithful to the injunctions of the fiery abbot and to the traditions of Trappistine austerity and sanctity all through the nineteenth century, especially under the guidance of the saintly Mère Pacifique. Several of the most fervent convents in the Order today can trace their ancestry back to Vaise: among them, Grottaferrata, outside Rome, and Echourgnac in western France. However, when the antireligious laws of 1903 went into force, Vaise was suppressed. But France’s loss was Canada’s gain.
The pastor of Rogersville, New Brunswick, whose zeal was mainly responsible for the presence of the Trappists at Notre Dame du Calvaire, found a good farm for the Trappistines in his own parish, and soon the nuns of Vaise were on the high seas, bound for Acadia.
Nineteen of them landed at Quebec and arrived in Acadia in time to celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Heart, 1904, in the little farmhouse that was their temporary home. Monsignor Richard’s gallant parishioners went to work to help them build a convent, where the nuns were soon moderately well established.
At Vaise, the sisters had no farm work to do, since they were in a suburb of a big industrial city. They supported themselves by baking Hosts and making liturgical vestments. Although they continued to do this at their new home, the Cistercian nuns of Acadia soon discovered that farming in New Brunswick was a task that demanded no little time and energy. Often the nuns of Our Lady of the Assumption can be seen filing out to work in the fields and woods, the mother abbess at their head, at five o’clock in the morning, to take advantage of the first cool hours of the day. They interrupt their work to recite the office in the fields when the appointed times come around and return to the convent for an interval of reading and private prayer and another office before the noonday meal.
Dairy products, potatoes, and fruits help to support the Trappistine nuns. They also produce Mass wine from dried grapes; but their situation has always been even more precarious than that of the neighboring monks at Our Lady of Calvary. In fact, Dom Augustin Marre, the second Abbot General since the reunion, considered their survival a “daily miracle.” Survive they do, however, and their convent is slightly larger than Calvary, with between forty and fifty in the community. This is considered the ideal size for a house of nuns in our Order.
Notre Dame de Bon Conseil (Our Lady of Good Counsel), which came into being in the Province of Quebec in 1903, has had a peaceful and fervent career. In the early days of the house, when there were only ten sisters living in a temporary dwelling, Dom Edmond Obrecht made a regular visitation of the community and came away singing the praises of the Trappistines. They were, indeed, perhaps the most regular house he had found on the entire North American continent, in spite of their poverty and obscurity. So great was Dom Edmond’s edification at the nuns of Bon Conseil that he cherished dreams of retiring from office and ending his days as their spir
itual director—as his predecessor, Dom Edward Chaix-Bourbon, had done. He must have known it was nothing but a dream. Dom Edmond Obrecht was the last man in the Order who could have been content to hear the confessions of nuns, and there were many years of labor and traveling still before him. He would meet many important personages, make many speeches, and shake many hands—and, incidentally, accomplish a great deal of good for the Cistercian Order—before he was laid away in the shadow of Gethsemani’s abbatial church. Dom Edmond had far too much ambition to be a convent chaplain.
Under the protection of their officially appointed cellarer, St. Joseph, the nuns of Bon Conseil have had a quiet and edifying history, filled with the usual labors and hardships. The house is today slightly larger and more prosperous than the Trappistine convent in Acadia, thanks to its situation. One of its sources of income is a chocolate factory.
While we are still in Canada, we cannot ignore the greatest of the Canadian abbeys, whose foundation has already been described in another chapter. Notre Dame du Lac, well-known to French Canadians as La Trappe d’Oka, has developed into one of the most important Cistercian houses in the entire world. There is, perhaps, no other Trappist monastery that exercises such a profound influence in the social life of the nation where it was founded. One reason for this is the famous agricultural school conducted by the monks. It is affiliated to the University of Montreal and has always received the most lively attention and encouragement from the Canadian government. There are few Trappist monasteries in the world that can truthfully boast that they are scientific farmers, but one of the few is certainly La Trappe d’Oka, famous for its prize stock, its apples, and its cheese.
The abbey of Our Lady of the Lake has paid for its greater prosperity by greater trials than any other Cistercian house in Canada. Twice, in 1902 and 1916, the whole monastery has burned to the ground. The second time, the monks were left without a roof over their heads in the rigors of a Canadian winter. More recently, in 1934, a great barn was destroyed by fire; the harvest had just been stored away and a whole year’s supplies went up in flames. Providentially, the livestock was saved.
From all these accidents, La Trappe d’Oka has risen up again stronger than she was before. Her abbot, Dom Pacôme Gaboury, is the father of what is perhaps the largest Trappist community in the world. The most recent figures do not allow us to judge clearly whether Notre Dame du Lac is larger than the famous Irish abbey of Mount Melleray. But in any case, it has over a hundred and eighty members, and this is not the fruit of a sudden rush of postulants. It has been a normal condition for many years.
Instead of making foundations, Dom Pacôme has kept his house at this level, only occasionally sending picked men from his community to help the smaller, hard-pressed houses of Canada, such as Our Lady of the Prairies, which is really a filiation of Bellefontaine. In fact, the present abbot of Notre Dame du Lac has most of the houses in Canada under his care in one way or another, since all are deeply indebted to his generosity and solicitude—especially the houses of nuns.
Antireligious legislation in France, besides endowing Canada with three first-class Cistercian communities, was responsible for two new foundations in South America. They were the first ever attempted in that continent, and they did not last. Both owed their origin to Dom Chautard, although one was a convent of Trappistines. The abbot of Sept-Fons had succeeded only partially in his efforts to save the Cistercian monasteries of France. We saw that one or two houses had to be sacrificed. One of them was Fontgombault. Another was Chambarand, in the Alpine department of Isère—of which Dom Chautard himself had been abbot for a while. Dom Chautard had scoured Europe with characteristic energy, looking for a good refuge. He looked for a place in Scotland and he looked for a place in Poland. Then he made his decision: the foundation was to be in Brazil.
On August 19, 1904, a colony of monks from Sept-Fons set sail for South America and settled in the state of’Sâo Paolo, Brazil. The monastery was called Maristella (Star of the Sea), and its long, rambling, one-story white buildings straggled among the palms of an upland plantation. The climate was found to be not altogether impossible, at least on high ground, and four years later an entire convent of nuns, Notre Dame du Sacré-Coeur, at Màcon, was also transferred to Brazil.
Time was allowed for both houses to get a good trial. The years of World War I went by. In all, more than two decades passed before Dom Chautard finally decided that the tropics were not satisfactory for Cistercians. The biggest difficulty was that there were so few suitable vocations. Good recruiting might, perhaps, have compensated for a tiresome climate, but there seemed little point in keeping alive two houses that would never be anything but a drain on the more vigorous communities at home in France. So, in 1927, in spite of the protest of the Brazilian hierarchy, Dom Chautard closed both communities and brought the religious back to France.
Most of the monks went to what was to be one of the most splendid foundations that have been made since the Middle Ages. The generosity of the Belgian Royal House and other wealthy benefactors brought back the Cistercian life to the ruins of a famous old abbey, Our Lady of Orval, in Luxemburg. Nothing that has been built by the Order in our time can even approach the elaborate care lavished upon the plans and construction of the new Orval. The great stone buildings have all the grandeur and simplicity of twelfth-century Cistercian architecture, although they are on a scale that would probably stagger the average Cistercian abbot of our time. Nobody else will be able to afford such buildings, but the taste and dignity of the new abbey as a whole are well worthy of study and imitation.
As for the Trappistines who had been transported from Mâcon to Brazil—when they were shipped back to France, they reoccupied the abbey of Chambarand, which had been vacated at the time of the Brazilian foundation.
It would almost seem that the Brazilian venture brought to an end the great period of Cistercian activity in the tropics—a period which reached its height around the turn of the century. Few attempts, if any, have been made to send Trappists to the equatorial zone since World War I.
Yet, missionaries are still trying to prevail upon Trappists to settle in the jungles, where they themselves are laboring. The latest invitation has come to Our Lady of Koeningshoeven, Tilburg, Holland, begging for a foundation in the Dutch East Indies.
Since some of the monks have begun to study the dialects of those islands, it seems that the offer will be accepted.
X
A Contemplative Order in Two World Wars
ON THE Feast of Our Lady’s Presentation, in November, 1911, a young Frenchman was walking along a footpath through fields and woods in the rolling open country just across the Belgian border. Through the trees he could see the buildings of the monastery. Just as he was about to emerge from the woods, a bell sounded in the little steeple. It was the noon Angelus. He fell on his knees in the middle of the path.
Michael Carlier was not yet twenty-one, but he had finished his military service, and now he wanted to bury himself in the cloister, to live in silence and prayer, laboring in the fields, fasting, doing penance. Like so many who feel themselves drawn to the Cistercian life, he could not say exactly what it was that brought him there: but it seemed to be the will of God that he should find peace nowhere else but under this roof.
There was little out of the ordinary about this postulant. There have been hundreds like him before and since. But, unlike so many thousands of other members of this silent Order, Michael Carlier—his name in religion was Frater Maxime—has left the world a record of himself.
After he died, his notes and letters were collected and woven together into a book. It is a narrative of deep significance. The story of the vocation and life and sacrifice of Frater Maxime Carlier gives us a better insight than any other document we possess into the real part played by the Cistercians in the wars that have torn apart the world of our time.
Frater Maxime had entered one of the best monasteries in the Order, Notre Dame des Forges, commonly called
“Chimay.” The master of novices, Father Anselme le Bail, was a man of deep spirituality and learning who had penetrated far into the theology of the Cistercian writers of the twelfth century. Taking them as his commentators on the Rule of St. Benedict, he had evolved a clear and well-ordered spiritual doctrine, by the light of which he was able to give his novices a more thoroughly Cistercian intellectual formation than they could find anywhere in the Order except, perhaps, at Sept-Fons, where Dom Chautard was abbot.
The novitiate at Chimay was filled with a spirit of balance and sanity; a spirit of simplicity, of clarity; it was eminently Benedictine, and one thing dominated all: the love and service of Christ.
No doubt all these things had been present ever since De Ranch’s reform, but they were buried, cramped in other elements which might have proved dangerous and had, indeed, had bad effects on temperaments like that of Frater Maxime. There were many like him in France. He was intelligent, generous, yet there was something in his nature that tended to warp the spiritual life out of its true direction—a certain rigorism, a harshness that chilled the heart and bred suspicion of God, instead of love. Perhaps there was some germ of Jansenism there that tended to breed suspicion between his soul and God—but it was only a germ, and in the healthy atmosphere of Chimay the germ did not prosper. Under other circumstances, Frater Maxime might have turned into one of those distressed, nervous monks who say many prayers and do many acts of penance and work hard but never find rest for their souls and never come close to perfection—their lives never seem to acquire any real unity and meaning: there is always something missing. Here, however, in the clean spiritual air and under the strong light that filled the novitiate of Chimay, the soul of this postulant flourished with a rapid and healthy growth. The influence of his father master was supplemented by the reading of St. Gertrude, from whom Frater Maxime learned a doctrine that can be summed up in two words: confidence and love.
The Waters of Siloe Page 22