Today I watched a short but moving video about a Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, that was founded at the close of the Second World War. Once filled with 84 monks, it has now dwindled to only handful, who are being forced to leave because there are not enough of them — in good enough health — to keep the place going.
When one of the older monks, stooped over and at one point seen shuffling about his room with difficulty, is asked, “Where are you going next?” he responds, pointing upward with a laugh, “Heaven.”
Photographs are shown of the monastery during better days, monks eating together in community, doing manual labor, and offering the traditional Latin Mass. “You should have heard this choir,” the elderly priest says, “when it had 84 monks in it!”
Bright, black and white images of choir stalls laden with music during a High Mass filled with religious are replaced by a dark, empty church with a few laity attending a Novus Ordo Mass under a large, garish stained glass window not seen in the earlier photos.
Another monk, who gives the impression of being the prior (without being identified as such), tells the interviewer, “We’re in the process of trying to determine what this Church will be used for. If it’s not used for anything it’ll probably be torn down.”
“What’s it feel like to close a monastery?” He says. “It is very sad. But they say there’s a monk in everybody. Because there’s a desire for completion, for fulfillment….there’s an emptiness that calls out to be filled.” Later, he simply sums up the situation by saying, “So anyway, that’s…that’s where we are…” before looking at his watch, as though he has somewhere else at that moment that he needs to be.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that the video is a heartbreaking metaphor for the Catholic Church itself. By the end, I had tears in my eyes. It is a tragedy:
Watching this, I could not help being reminded of what Hilary White wrote yesterday about what has become of religious life in much of the world:
My conversation with the Important Monastic Personage came as the Catholic world received the news that yet another great, ancient, monastic tree has fallen. Vatican Radio reports that the Cistercian Abbey of Himmerod, founded in 1134 by St. Bernard of Clairvaux[3], will close. The 900-year history of Himmerod ends ignominiously with a dull thud: “The monastery’s property, near the village of Grosslittgen, will be transferred to the Catholic diocese of Trier, while the six monks will move to other monasteries.”
I’m afraid this news elicited from me not much more than a shrug. There is always a good reason when a great tree falls. I don’t know this one in Germany, but I’ve visited quite a lot of monasteries in Europe – mainly in Italy and Britain – and it’s always the same disease present in nearly all of them; the symptoms are spiritual apathy, indifference, a paralysing acedia[4]. If this old German tree has finally fallen, an examination of the carcass will invariably reveal extensive rot; there is usually little left of the heartwood[5].
In Italy the failure of the Novus Ordo “new springtime” to revive – or even to minimally sustain – monastic life is perhaps more palpable than anywhere else, because monasticism was omnipresent here. Every town of any size has its monastery of Benedictines or its house of Poor Clares and often Dominican or Carmelite convents all at the same time. Monastics are still revered by the local laity, but once inside what do we find? The architecture is still there; delicate stonework and frescoes – often of extreme antiquity – are painstakingly preserved usually with considerable help from the Italian government. Yet, while cold stone is conserved, in the monastic communities themselves, the great living organs of monastic life — the breath, blood, and heart that gives life to the community: the liturgy, the Chant, the vita communis, the single-minded pursuit of the Summum Bonum — are barely shadows of their former reality.
Visiting such places, you always get the same kind of response if you dare to ask how vocations are going; a kind of dull resentment that “young people can’t commit these days” and a blank, incomprehending stare if you ask, “Commit to what?” In those houses still clinging to life, the purpose of monastic life has simply faded away, attention turning to “social projects,” experiments with permaculture gardening, concerts, lectures, crafts and art history.
Lord, please save your Church.
One by one the little lights just flicker out. Soon there will be nothing but darkness in much of the world. And then what?
Not to be melodramatic but when the “lights” that are supposed to point us to Christ are extinguished, the enemy will then appear with his own ‘light’, his own saviour and his own “church”. The faithful will need to hold fast those things that give light (eg Rosary, mental prayer, spiritual sacrifices etc) when the ordinary means (The Mass and regular sacramental life) is banished to the wilderness. It is depressing I know but it has been fortold by Our Lord and his saints so we know it will be resolved in the end.
more of a rhetorical question, really
Remain happy in the knowledge that the Church Triumphant await’s the arrival of a multitude of purified Soul’s…
Joy will not abandon the faithful heart….. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/42dc26cbad0ea6017c6558ef7996343c9e29d5840f00486f81fff5e7bf825f0e.gif
“It is depressing I know but it has been foretold by Our Lord and his saints so we know it will be resolved in the end.”
100 per cent! The WAR has been won, it is for us to co-operate with Grace to encourage and protect as many in our
orbit that we can with the light of THE Truth, and give daily combat to the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.
The pattern is death and resurrection, so I fully expect the Lord to step in in a very big way and deliver us from this mess, now that we are almost fully convinced that we cannot do it on our own.
So you are not doing anything at all besides praying. That’s a sign of indifference.
Soon to become a mosque!
And that disgrace of a Pope in Rome says he gets “worried” when he hears of traditional religious orders which are thriving with plentiful vocations. Utterly unbelievable that a pope would be more comfortable with the decimation of religious life than abundant vocations. A pox on this vile cabal which has taken over the Vatican. He is Exhibit A in the rogues gallery which is responsible for this utter debacle.
I totally agree, and another tidbit I know of that will reinforce your assumption is a sister I know in vocation told me that those women looking into their order, which is not traditional, who say when asked by other sisters about their prayer life tell them they participate/pray the Rosary or Adoration are looked down on as not good candidates. This and many other orders are revolted by the fact that women discerning pray traditional prayers, etc. They reject anything that was pre V2.
Several new, traditional orders of nuns and sisters that are overflowing with applicants and have the opposite problem… where to house their postulants, or how to fundraise to either add space, or begin new construction.
My friend had to correct the sister(s) stating that applicants/discerners are participating in sanctioned catholics prayer devotions and that most are not aware of other manner of prayer such as Ignatius. It just boggles my mind that prayerful women who want to serve God/Jesus are being more scrutinized simply because they pray the Rosary/Adoration. When I was in this order for a brief time they almost had a hissy fit because I went to a TLM of which I had never been too before.
If they do not want to be an order that is traditional in the usual sense because they are apostolic, that is fine, but when they do not like members to pray such powerful prayers as the Rosary/Adoration then to me they have fallen away.
Please be careful not to overgeneralize. Not all orders treat candidates in the manner you describe.
Women must be careful to do a little research on the orders they may feel drawn to. Any order that is part of the rebellious LCWR should be considered suspect.
However, it is easy to identify orders that accept faithful women. The orders aligned with the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious is a good place to start: cmswr dot org.
Is praying the rosary verboten now? I’m living in the NE now and forced to attend novus ordo churches and no one except me an one or two other older women ever pray the rosary before mass in the morning. And I’m not a cradle catholic!
Pray it yourself. We had all better get used to that. It’s ok, God hears us regardless.
What? I do pray it every day–by myself. And I pray it before mass every day that I go, which is about as many days in the week as I can. That wasn’t the point.
That’s true. I converted to a latin rite church three years ago and the order that administers my church, the institute of Christ sovereign priest, has a waiting list for postulants. So the small traditional movement is thriving. And this pope knows it too.
Nah, see, that New Springtime™ just need more time to be implemented. Everybody and their Grandma knows it takes about 176 1/2 years to properly implement a council. Just canonize a few more post-conciliar Popes that brought us to this wonderful precipice and everything will be okay.
By the time I got to 55 seconds within the film, I thought; ” Commit to what?”
If you think it is bad in the monastic life: I am afraid it will be worse in the priesthood. Instead of a decrease in the priesthood, we shall probably see an increase and shall wish there had been a decrease in them.
Every one of them: “We don’t know what happened”.
It staggers the mind. That vast tunnel of bleak darkness they call a church is a reflection of the spiritual world they tried to construct, in the same way a beautiful church and liturgy reflect a different view of world we can’t see. Liturgy doesn’t lie.
It’s all very well to strike a prophetic stance, but what do you know, after all, about the spiritual world they tried to construct, hmmm?
As for the Church, when they arrived in Utah in 1947 they were able to buy government surplus quonset huts that had been in use for civilian housing during WWII. Not being able to afford anything better, being a nascent community and in the middle of Mormon Utah whose citizens were not rushing to their financial aid, they built the church they could afford, following the style of the quonset huts. Evidently it was simple, affordable design. I’ll grant that it is ugly, but I doubt very much that it was intended to be permanent. It was, comparatively, a fledgling community with provisional buildings.
Look at that graveyard, a graveyard for saints, many of them. So the Lord drew great fruit from this community, and I for one, knowing only as little as you do, would not say a word against them.
Go to :45 seconds. Look at the current NO, in the dark with the hideous stain glass window, and what appears to be the usual bumbling sign of peace. Then go to 1:11 or so and see the old BW picture of the place filled, and they are celebrating what appears to be the EF. The narration at that point says “you should have heard the choir when it had 84 monks in it”.
The look again at the careful if not brilliant editing from 1:18 to 1:19, contrasting abundant if not harsh light of one era, to darkness and emptiness in the next.
Meanwhile, look at the design of the pews, the quality of craftsmanship and wood in the old photos. There was money. There was just a different vision. And they built that vision, and it died on the spot.
Not every monk or priest is an evil scholar trying to build a new stairway to heaven, and I’m sure there are saints among the dead, in spite the VII reforms which deformed the liturgy there into that spiritual darkness that killed the place off. But this kind of death is the fruit of error. And for every spiritual deformation that leads to death, there most assuredly is a monk or priest or some other innovator trying to build a new stairway to heaven. They are destroyers and deceivers of the gullible and the innocent, monks or otherwise.
“We haven’t had anybody stay in 30 years”.
That, however you roll, is a statement that behooves some level of culpability.
The sadness is for the quixotic aura spilling out of the video. Without question, it’s unbearably sad. But sad mixed with a strong side of pathetic. Sadness realizing that this is still the tip of the iceberg.
Did you read Hilary’s post from yesterday?
“We haven’t had anybody stay in 30 years”.
My experience with certain trappists informs my, as you put it, prophetic stance. I’ll leave that right there. I knew a Trappist abbot, personally, that told me nonchalantly, that some things just go extinct and that’s that, as he looked at an old photo of a much larger group of monks hanging on his office wall. At this same monastery you can buy CDs by people teaching obvious heresy (use your imagination).
“So the Lord drew great fruit from this community”…and then he killed it off? What you are implying seems quite muddled. Last I heard, traditional-minded monasteries, convents, and even canonically-incorrect orders don’t have this kind of a vocations problem. Their problem is where to put the new ones.
The hijackers of V2 and their groupies and proteges since at every locale of the Church have not been trying to build a “new stairway to heaven” because they no more believe in heaven than they do hell. Unknowingly, perhaps, they have been constructing a fast train to hell, one of box and cattle cars much like the ones used to transport those sentenced to the nazi concentration camps. Only these “victims” will never be free.
Amen.
Ultimately this monastery was not faithful to God.
I know there’s this thing called “editing,” but neither of the monks spoke the word ‘Jesus.’ The peace that people came to seek at that Monastery wasn’t to be found in the “land, the surroundings” or however the one Father put it.
Contrast with Mother Cecelia of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles on film saying “We love Him.”
Sad, oh yes.
They have evolved. And now they have disassembled. And to dust they return.
You’re right about the wreckovation, from faith itself and manifested not only in distorted theology but hideous chapels, art, etc. These Trappists and others like them weren’t the leaders, though, and I do feel sorry for them. Powerful and seductive forces were at work and of course are still at work.
I’ve been to retreats at places like this. Pray for these monks, in your charity.
LOOK. AT. THE. CONSTRUCTION. Of course this place is closed now. That is quite possibly the ugliest building I’ve ever seen. It looks like a confused airplane hangar. What do you think modernist abstract art conveys? It conveys nothing. Abstract art, in a liturgical setting, conveys relativism. It conveys the idea that conscience is God. This is an ideology, not something that produces love, light, children. Many of these Trappists are relativists. The worst of them don’t even hide the fact that they are no longer christian.
Want to see another trappist hanger-on?
http://www.snowmass.org/
Look at the second paragraph on the “From the Abbot” page:
“The Dutch theologian Eduard Schillebeeckx referred to Christ as “the sacrament of encounter with God”…” When you start with Schillebeeckx, it’s all downhill, right to the grav, from there.
Thomas Keating, a preeminent Trappist lives there, the “inventor” of centering prayer, who keeps on keeping on with his syncretist tripe. Within 2 mins of this video starting, we get “easter religions” and “buddha”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcNywV8nLeU
In this interview, his answer to “what is God to you” is “the buddhists have done well…” and goes on for two hours with new age tripe. “Call him Butch” if you want:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7CHPoPivrw
“Our scriptures are based on a view of God that is patriarchal and limited…and doesn’t work anymore…we need a new cosmology to appeal to people of our time…in the future if not now already.”
So I’m not that sad about a trappist monastery closing. I’m sad that it own internal dynamism was corrupted, deceived by the spirit of the age, by Modernism.
“You have to open your conscience…to transcend the rational concept of God…only the transcendent experience do we find God…is change itself…the evolutionary cosmology in the last 50 years…is a revelation of a higher power…except what has emerged in the evolutionary process…always becoming…becoming everything…human consciousness is God experiencing humanity…we are an icon of God…God does not fit into any affirmative statement”
It goes on and one. For 2 hours.
There is a trappist monastery in France that only recently started doing their liturgy in the EF. The Trappist Monastery of Mariawald cut over from the NO madness in 2008 when they were down to 14 monks. I don’t know if they recovered since then, but at least they read the writings on the wall.
I don’t know if this community was as out there as Keating is, but by the soul crushing looks of the place, they for sure didn’t have any life in them, and that is why they are gone.
Truth is beauty and beauty is truth. Ugliness and lies are bedfellows. This place is so ugly, it could not have taught the truth. Some of these guys would rather die than give up their ideology. And so it is!
The other thing to note is that most of these guys came after WWll, which is either a true vocational calling after the horrors of war, or well meaning guys with no home to go back to perhaps. The irony is that after all the back to basics earth-hippie nonsense of the 60’s, non of that translated to the Catholic equivalent in the monastic life.
The 60s and Vatican 2 were a disaster for the church and the world.
It’s not “modernist” architecture. The monastery was built with quonset huts. Monastic foundations usually begin with similar temporary buildings (Clear Creek monks first lived in a converted barn), then later construct appropriate monastic buildings.
I’ve referred to them for the longest time as the Presbyterian Trappists.
Utterly tragic.
Well, the corruption or the falling apart of the Religious Orders in the church was already prophesied by the venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser and many others, and surprisingly, also hidden in the sacred pages of the scriptures. Holzhauser is a priest and mystic. He’s one of the most quoted in books about Eschatology yet so unknown. Holzhauser wrote about the Fifth Age of the Church (which is our time) (the Spirit of the church of Sardis – see chapter 2 of Revelation). Holzhauser was given infused knowledge of what the prophecies of the Book of Revelation meant up until the second coming of Our Lord.
Bartholomew Holzhauser said, for instance, that the seven churches of the Apocalypse represented the seven ages of the Church before the Parusía of Our Lord. He said that in these times, even the most holy religious orders of the church would be corrupt and the church will enter a time of the great apostasy.
Here’s a good start:
http://todayscatholicworld.com/bartholomew-holzhauser-catholic-prophecy-papacy.pdf
Here’s the video in Spanish where Holzhauser is quoted saying the religious orders of the church will become corrupt and will fall apart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb5BFl5YHfE&t=265s
A blast of truth like a bracing cold breeze. Thanks.
Read this gem about architecture hot off the press, then reflect on any modern church design: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture
The recent OCSO General Chapter took a number of important decisions, including the closure of some monasteries. Unfortunately, and oddly, they did not announced it publicly, as other Orders usually do. I also heard nothing about the Holy See intervention (pontiffical commissioning) of the Trappist German traditionalist community.
When you pray for the Pope, take him in the spirit to this place. He won’t want to stay with you, and he won’t want to look at it, but keep at it, keep bringing him back here and to other desolations like it, and pray pray pray for him, in the spirit.
This is a foretaste, among others, of the “abomination that makes desolate”:
Dan 7:25 “He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and shall think to change the times and the law; and they shall be given into his hand for a time, two times, and half a time….”
Dan 8:11-ff “11 It magnified itself, even up to the Prince of the host; and the continual burnt offering was taken away from him, and the place of his sanctuary was overthrown. 12 And the host was given over to it together with the continual burnt offering through transgression; and truth was cast down to the ground, and the horn acted and prospered. 13 Then I heard a holy one speaking; and another holy one said to the one that spoke, “For how long is the vision concerning the continual burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate, and the giving over of the sanctuary and host to be trampled under foot?””
I wish a traditional order would take this over! Such a sad video. Those poor remaining monks.
In Tucson a Benedictine order of nuns closed down back in 2016. Beautiful convent and church. Now it is up for sake and will probably be sold for a mall or golf course.
The Cistercians/Trappists fell for the lies of the post-Vatican II era, hook, line and sinker. The modernist heresy is lethal. It is very sad to see.
So have most “Catholics”.
That is true. I converted from the Anglican faith and frankly most of our Anglican churches are more catholic than the novus ordo. That’s why I became latin rite Catholic to begin with.
Well, even with the NO, unless you are in eastern Europe or the mideast, you would be a Latin Rite Catholic, since we comprise about 98° of the Church.
I know that but I’m talking about traditional latin rite churches that celebrate the Tridentine mass IN LATIN. That’s what I meant. The FSSO, ICSP,, SPPX, are all traditional latin speaking orders and the first two are in full communion with Rome.
Being an authentic Catholic, including of the Latin Rite, goes nuch deeper than just the True Latin Mass (there is a Latin form of the NO). Even the “permitted” 1962 version used for the “extraordinary” rite contains Modernist errors. The True form is contained in the last edition of the Roman Missal released under Pope Pius XII. When the Council of Trent created the Latin Mass it did so dogmatically as the Ordinary Universal Magisterium, which is infallible and, therefore, unrefirmable. When the pope at that time, St. Pius V, promulgated that Mass he did so officially as the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church, which makes that promulgation infallible. In that promulgation he states the Mass being promulgated is the Mass to be used by the entire Church until the end of time. Being infallible, the promulgation and the Mass itself is not reformable nor can it be contradicted, replaced or demoted — or so I was taught. Yet, the creation and promulgation of the NO during the papacy of Paul VI did just that. One “truth” cannot contradict another. Doing so negates the doctrine of infallibility of the Ordinary Universal Magisterium and the pope, which was doctrinally established by the First Vatican Coincil. If the doctrine of infallibility is negated then neither the Magisterium nor the pope are infallible. If they are not infallible than ALL of our doctrines and teachings from the beginning, including Hoky Scripture, can be changed or discarded and our faith becomes one of mere legends, myths and pius writings no better than the pagans of the ancient past. Thus Vatican II and the creation and promulgation of the NO opened the door for the innovations and abuses we’ve had since 1965 and culminating in the attrocities of Francis and his supporters. Therefore, being authentically Catholic means adhering to the perennial Magisterial doctrines and teachings of the Church prior to V2, rejecting the errors of V2 and its innovations, and rejecting the errors in all Vatican and papal docunents since V2 including those in the statenents and publications of Francis. But you probably already know all this.
We have a Trappist Monastery near us. My first spiritual director was an old priest there — a very holy man. He’s dead many years now and the remainder are, for the most part, filled with the modernist trappings. I went to a guided retreat there about 20 years ago and was internally very disheartened, even though I didn’t yet understand the heresy of things like “Centering Prayer.” Since that time I’ve only done private, silent retreats.
I have been searching for a good, holy, retreat experience and just last week was led to check out the Casa Maria retreat house in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s run by the Sister Servants of the Eternal Word and, once I saw some of the speakers they have coming in to do the retreats, I was impressed. (The likes of Fr. Mitch Pacwa, Fr. Andrew Apostoli and Fr. John Horgan.)
I tried to sign up for a women’s retreat in January, but they are already booked. I’m on a wait list.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5e97c8f96741952f1126594c65a28d3c1bf03a31a1f7ba1f13d0a2acc5851c2e.jpg
THE
SOCIETY’S
BRAG
There is a Rock
Upon we’re built
That evil men
Will sometimes tilt
And though they vex us
To the hilt
We never leave
Reject or jilt
We daily kneel
In His Blood spilt
To weigh down Rock
Of golden-gilt
And as they sink
In their sin’s silt
As though He built
On one lone stilt
Upon this Rock
His voice, love’s-lilt
We stand our ground –
Do what Thou wilt!
Christ never left us orphans. Merci Marcel!!
Hello? Who are you referring to here? I don’t get the reference.
Sorry, for a minute I thought the reference was to the Legionaries.
NEVER the Leginaries!! The Society of St. Pius X, the most hated Roman Catholic Order of Priests in the Universe.
Sorry, for a minute there I thought this reference was to the Legionaries of Christ.
Marcel, as in Archbishop Lefebvre, is my guess.
Sadly, my first thought was, “They deserve it.” These old men sold out to modernism instead of fighting for the faith that is so beautifully depicted in the old photos. They could’ve continued to serve the Lord, instead they served heresy and destruction.
Not very insightful of me, and indicative of my mood more than these poor monks, but that’s all I can think about this story: they’re reeping what they sowed.
I used to visit a monastery back east. Same same. Dwindling and aging, the monks were and are entirely invested in the liberalism of every writer from Thomas Merton to Joan Chittister. Their gift shop is overflowing with bilge along with lovely hand crafted gifts.
The octagonal sanctuary has a table in the middle and chairs surrounding on four sides.
The NO mass is said reverently but the wine is white and they offer centering prayer to guests.
That’s just a few details of how things are. I am not sorry to see such places die, no matter how peaceful the surrounding acres or how sweet the monks are.
The Trappist monastery I’ve visited also had the centering prayer thing. And lay women spiritual directors during retreats. Sounds similar to what you’re describing. The Trappists have that reputation.
But my SSPX parishes uses white wine for the Mass. That isn’t really indicative of anything bad!
I have been taught that red wine was required. But my Catholic education has been sketchy and somewhat autodidactic, and I am happy to admit being incorrect on that point.
I know what you mean. I thought the same thing in the past.
But I would add a caution. As we saw in an order of sisters in Canada, who fell prey to every new age innovation, there were those few sisters who kept their habits on, and suffered grievously interiorly for what had happened to their order. Only God knows what fruit their interior agony bestowed upon others to save some of the souls of their modernist sisters Their union with Christ in their isolation, rejection, and sadness could have blessed fruit in an age to come. What the satate of soul of these men in the video, only God knows.
I remember reading Carroll Houselander, telling a story about a Bavarian nun in her boarding school days as a teen. It was in England but most of the nuns were French. This Bavarian nun was an outcast to the other nuns due to her inability to speak their language and also due to the Germans involvement in the war. As Carroll was walking down the hallway corridor she saw the nun sitting in a little cubicle with her head down, polishing the girls’ shoes. As Carroll approached, she saw that the nun was weeping quietly. It was then that Our Lord gave Carroll one of her first mystical experiences. She saw the nun with the crown of thorns upon her head. That has always stayed with me and reminds me of how many suffer in silence who are loved so much by Our Lord.
Stay away from Carroll Houselander. She fell into the clutches of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, or he fell into her clutches and they went waaaaaay off into new age and modernist thought. Lots of evolution, lots of self, lots of near-heresy. Be careful what comes in a sweet package.
There is nothing ‘sweet’ about Caryll Houselander. Where is your evidence of her being into new age and near heresy? It is so easy to write people off . Her writings are profound ,prolific and full of God. I have gained so much from her writings. She suffered terribly in childhood and Christ used those trials to transform her. I hope I don’t sound like Francis but I hear great rigidity, perfectionism and an underlying anger within your posts.
The amazing fruits of the conciliar spring!
In the course of this sad, yet very edifying, article, Mr. Skojek cites Hillary White’s comparison of the growth or demise of monastic orders with that of the growth or demise of a living tree. I’m afraid, however, that this apt simile is marred, at least to my eyes and ears, by the comment: “…an examination of the carcass will invariably reveal extensive rot; there is usually little left of the heartwood.”
While the structure of a tree depends upon its heartwood, the life of a tree depends upon the greenwood, that is, the living surface of the tree, and the protective bark that covers the greenwood.
It is a very simple thing for an enemy neighbor to kill a tree. It does not require the effort to saw or cut the tree down. All one needs to do is to ‘ring’ the tree: to cut away a ring of bark and greenwood, so that the trunk, branches, and leaves are no longer fed by the living sap which rises from the root of the tree.
Now, I’ll stop playing the part of ‘Chauncey Gardener’ (from the motion picture, ‘Being There’) and get to the point: for the past fifty years (and actually, for a lot longer), religious communities, monasteries, and parish churches have been separated from the life of Christ, as has been expressed in Sacred Scripture, Holy Tradition, and the Teaching Authority of His Church. Our Lord himself has told us: “I am the vine. You are the branches. Without Me, you can do nothing.”
Unless and until the clergy begins to start teaching Christ, and His Scripture, Tradition, and Authority, or unless us lay folk take up the task, church closings like this will continue. It is just that simple.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fb285e0756533996fdf2906455a147712473e6b6beb3766436ad6851cfe15171.jpg
St. Vincent of Lerins asked what Catholics should do if the entire Church was infected by a “novel contagion”. He explained that, at such a time, the safe path is to cleave to tradition.
THE
VINEYARD
Disease has crept
Along the branch
Rotting from within
A pestilence
And blackened stench
Mold that smells like sin
And in a crook
On branch near Vine
There are some plants who sit
Preferring Vine
Accepting branch
Their leaves and stems are split
But years ago
A faithful farmer
Grafted growths to Vine
Broke from branches
Twisted cracked
“These shoots I know are mine.”
And to this day
Forever more
To Vine these stalks adhere
Branching churches
Priests and schools —
Glistening grapes appear!
How sad and also sad for Our Lord to see this happening. Unfortunately this is the ‘ungodly’ world we are living in today. We the laity must now continue to carry on the banner of Our Faith with Perseverance, God’s Power and Prayer
There is a book entitled, “Warriors of God” by Walter Nigg. In the front of the book he wrote that if you want to hit the Church then you have to go after the monasteries first. This is what’s been going on for the last 60 years. Heaven help us all.
Very sad, but I disagree that it is a metaphor for the Catholic Church as a whole. Jesus promised us that the Church would be with us until the end of the world.
But it will be a small amount of faithful.
I heard a non-Christian expression that sounded very Mormon about half-way through the video and it runs against one of the key messages of Sacred Scripture.
What is going to become of these poor men? So tragic.
I just watched, reluctantly, the video. Not one word about Christ Jesus, or God, or “vocation.” So people are looking for ‘completion?’ How sad that these old monks have lost their savour as salt of the earth. No wonder nobody comes!
Look at the orders who speak of giving oneself completely to Christ! Bursting at the seams – men and women – eager to give themselves, to do penance, to suffer for Jesus, with Jesus, for the love of the Almighty…that’s why this monastery is closing down – its soul is gone.
I’m glad that you didn’t mention the comparative rate of growth in Traditional Monasteries who celebrate EF Mass and are enriched by its many traditions. The reason is that it’s now so obvious, that I felt it was more dignified this way in light of the circumstances in particular, and sometimes, especially when passing these articles on, the suggestion is more powerful than the statement.