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If ever there was a country where men loved comfort, pleasure, and material se-curity, good health and conversation about the weather and the World Series and the Rose Bowl; if ever there was a land where silence made men nervous and prayer drove them crazy and penance scared them to death, it is America. Yet, quite suddenly, Americans—the healthiest, most normal, most energetic, and most optimistic of the younger generation of Americans—have taken it into their heads to run off to Trappist monasteries and get their heads shaved and put on robes and scapulars and work in the fields and pray half the night and sleep on straw and, in a word, become monks.

When you ask them why they have done such things, they may give you a very clear answer or, perhaps, only a rather confused answer; but in either case the answer will amount to this: the Trappists are the most austere order they could find, and Trap-pist life was that which least resembled the life men lead in the towns and cities of our world. And there is something in their hearts that tells them they cannot be happy in an atmosphere where people are looking for nothing but their own pleasure and advantage and comfort and success.

They have not come to the monastery to escape from the realities of life but to find those realities: they have felt the terrible insufficiency of life in a civilization that is entirely dedicated to the pursuit of shadows.

What is the use of living for things that you cannot hold on to, values that crumble in your hands as soon as you possess them, pleasures that turn sour before you have begun to taste them, and a peace that is constantly turning into war? Men have not become Trappists merely out of a hope for peace in the next world: something has told them, with unshakable conviction, that the next world begins in this world and that heaven can be theirs now, very truly, even though imperfectly, if they give their lives to the one activity which is the beatitude of heaven.

That activity is love: the clean, unselfish love that does not live on what it gets but on what it gives; a love that increases by pouring itself out for others, that grows by self-sacrifice and becomes mighty by throwing itself away.

Is it any wonder that Trappist monasteries are places full of peace and content-ment and joy? These men, who have none of the pleasures of the world, have all the happiness that the world is unable to find. Their silence is more eloquent than all the speeches of politicians and the noise of all the radios in America. Their smiles have more joy in them than has the laughter of thousands. When they raise their eyes to the hills or to the sky, they see a beauty which other people do not know how to find. When they work in the fields and the forests, they seem to be tired and alone, but their hearts are at rest, and they are absorbed in a companionship that is tremendous, because it is

A THOMAS MERTON READER · 3.7 “If Ever There Was a Country…” 153 three Persons in one infinite Nature, the One Who spoke the universe and draws it all back into Himself by His love; the One from Whom all things came and to Whom all things return: and in Whom are all the beauty and substance and actuality of every-thing in the world that is real.

THE WATERS OF SILOE

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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.

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 plows 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 Gen-eral 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.

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 Citeaux. In that way he steered a middle course between the exaggerations of Dom Augustín and the somewhat abstract and academic reform of De Rancé, 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

A THOMAS MERTON READER · 3.8 The Foundation of Gethsemani Abbey 155 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 Citeaux were too difficult and imposed too severe a burden.

In 1834 the Trappists were divided into two congregations, one keeping the usages of Citeaux 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 re-growth 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 soldiers 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 the house was full to overflowing.

That gave Dom Maxime, who was then abbot, two good reasons for deciding to make a foundation somewhere outside of France. He wanted to make room for postu-lants, 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.

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

156 3.8 The Foundation of Gethsemani Abbey · A THOMAS MERTON READER

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. Accord-ingly, 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 the answer to many prayers.

The eighty-six-year-old bishop, white-haired, leonine, beaming with the simplic-ity 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 Trappists’ 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 Trap-pists 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 congrega-tion 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 Melle-ray. 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

Trap-A THOMTrap-AS MERTON RETrap-ADER · 3.8 The Foundation of Gethsemani Trap-Abbey 157 pists. 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.

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 Pauli-nus, 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 des-ignated for the American foundation went to the dormitory and changed into secular clothing, afterward putting on their cowls over the unfamiliar garb. Then they descend-ed to the cloister with the two blankets that were their individual baggage and bdescend-edding 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 them-selves to prayer … let them maintain close union among themthem-selves.… 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!”

After that, the whole community, those traveling and those staying in France,

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sued 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 ki-lometer. 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

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