WHEN Dom Augustin and his monks sailed from New York in the autumn of 1814, the strange story of the Val Sainte Trappists in North America was not quite ended. In fact, its strangest episode was just about to begin. By a Providential accident, the congregation maintained a more or less theoretical foothold in the New World, and eventually the last survivor of Dom Augustin’s expedition was able to make a foundation in Nova Scotia. And this was to be the first Trappist monastery in the New World that was actually a success. True, Petit Clairvaux went out of existence in the 1920’s: but the monastery of Our Lady of the Valley, in Rhode Island, is of the same transplanted stock and flourishes mightily today.
Father Vincent de Paul Merle had been left behind in New York with six lay brothers to settle the affairs of the Trappists and arrange for the shipment of their heavy baggage—those ploughs and choir books that had wandered all over the Middle West. He and his companions finally took ship in April, 1815. In May they were at Halifax. There, they were told that their vessel had been ordered to turn into the St. Lawrence and sail up to Quebec, so they had to find accommodations on another ship leaving for France. They did so and went on board. However, the wind was in the wrong quarter, so Father Vincent went ashore to buy some provisions.
While he was in town, the wind changed and the ship cast off. When he got back to the waterfront, she was almost out of sight down the long bay.
Father Vincent had a guinea in his pocket and a breviary which he had brought with him to say some of the day hours between errands. He was wearing his second-best robe. That was all he had.
Nevertheless, he was not completely shattered by this accident. The truth is, Father Vincent was as zealous a missionary as Father Joseph Dunand: so much so that many people in the Order have accused him of getting stranded in Nova Scotia on purpose. And of all those who were disappointed when the American foundations were given up for good, Father Vincent had been the most grieved.
Yet, he was an exemplary Trappist. As a model son of Dom Augustin, his devotion to the will of God amounted to an obsession. Like his General, he was always talking and writing and thinking about La sainte volonté de Dieu. 1He would certainly never have engineered a deliberate plot to disobey his superiors. But from what we know of his character it is not impossible that some unconscious urge kept him lingering in Halifax longer than was necessary that day when the ship sailed for France.
So, he was able to give a sigh that had, perhaps, much secret satisfaction in it, and to resign himself to the fact that it was La sainte volonté de Dieu that had placed him in this land, which was almost destitute of priests; where there were numerous colonies of French Catholics and scores of settlements full of Micmac Indians who had once received the faith from missionaries, but who had now been without priests for fifty years and were going completely to pieces. He met dozens of them hanging around the streets of Halifax, half drunk or half starved, waiting to make a touch and pick up some small coin.
Since there were only two priests in that part of Nova Scotia, of whom one was just about to leave for Ireland and the other was half dead, Father Vincent’s suggestion that he might pitch in and help with the parish work in Halifax and its surroundings was received with the greatest enthusiasm by Bishop Plessis of Quebec. Meanwhile, a letter followed Dom Augustin to Europe and brought back permission to stay in Nova Scotia and try to make a Trappist foundation there.
So, Father Vincent de Paul Merle settled down for the winter.
He was well prepared to face all the difficulties of the active life, this Trappist. Father Vincent had received the most austere training as a secular priest in Revolutionary France. Born in 1768 at Chalamont, near Lyons, he was the son of a doctor who was also a pious Catholic. Before the Revolution broke out he had been educated by the Jesuits in Lyons. When the storm came, Dr. Merle was thrown into prison because of his religion, and his son fled to Switzerland to enter La Val Sainte. However, his health broke down. He received minor orders and the subdiaconate somewhere in Switzerland, re-crossed the border, and went to work as a catechist in the archdiocese of Lyons.
Although the persecution had lost some of its virulence, young Merle was taking his life in his hands when he entered upon this work. But such services as his were desperately needed.
A few years of the Terror had practically de-Christianized the land, as far as organized worship and instruction were concerned. The archbishop was, of course, living in exile. The archdiocese of Lyons was being run by a vicar-general who lived in hiding and controlled a widespread but simple organization of secret missions. The territory had been divided into sections, each of which comprised some thirty or forty communes. In each commune, twenty villages or so were portioned out to a missionary. The priests were accompanied by catechists and “scouts” and bodyguards who prepared the way, kept their eyes open for trouble, and arranged for their escape in case they were denounced.
Father Vincent was ordained priest on Holy Saturday, April 7, 1798. There were six others with him, and the ceremony was performed in the parlor of a private house by the Archbishop of Vienne, who had been traveling through the Alpine districts disguised as a peasant, administering Confirmation and the other Sacraments.
Soon after his ordination Father Vincent was caught and imprisoned at Bourg. There, he was sentenced to deportation, but while he was waiting to begin the terrible journey to Rochefort, his jailer announced that the sentence had been changed and that he was to go to the guillotine the next day.
Father Vincent did not have an opportunity to verify this statement, because a certain Father Perret, the “escape expert” of the archdiocese, showed up that night and helped him to break out of jail.
The young priest fled to the woods, where a secret seminary had been formed on an isolated farm. He taught Latin to boys who gathered there under cover of nightfall and sat around him on piles of hay in a barn. After Napoleon’s concordat with the Holy See in 1801 the seminary came out into the open and took over the old archbishop’s summer home at Meximieux.
By now things had become so quiet in the secular ministry that they had perhaps ceased to be interesting. Father Vincent once more crossed the border into Switzerland and presented himself at La Val Sainte, where he made his solemn vows on October 13, 1805.
This was just the time when La Val Sainte was enjoying a brief interval of favor with Napoleon. The Emperor conceived the idea of establishing some of Dom Augustin’s Trappists in one of the Alpine passes, where they would make themselves useful to him by maintaining a kind of hostel and posthouse on a most important military road into Italy.
Father Vincent de Paul Merle was chosen to preside over the new foundation of St. Catherine’s in the pass of Mont Génèvre. He went south in 1806 with half a dozen Trappists and some of the usual students to take up residence in an isolated house on the mountainside. Helped by soldiers, they started at once to build a permanent monastery: but the job was never to be completed, at least by monks. Napoleon’s affection for Trappists cooled down. They refused to take an oath supporting him in his conflict with the Holy See. It was time for Father Vincent to start traveling. He joined Dom Augustin at Bordeaux, where the police caught up with him: but only the abbot was wanted at the moment. Father Vincent and a few Trappists got on a boat for America.
That was in 1811. Instead of going west to join Dom Urban, Father Vincent attempted foundations in Pennsylvania and Maryland, with poorer results than Dom Urban was enjoying in Illinois. Finally, he joined the main group in New York.
All this background is necessary for an understanding of Father Vincent. He had spent only three years in a regular Trappist monastery. From then on he was either in pioneer foundations with one or two men or else isolated in parish and mission life. The active ministry was in his blood. And this influenced his whole conception of the Trappist vocation.
Like Dom Urban Guillet, when Father Vincent had to explain himself to government officials, he could say without a blush that one of the principal functions of the Order was to teach the ignorant. He did not hesitate to suggest making foundations on the express condition that the monks would devote themselves to the care of Indians or Acadian colonists.
He had, therefore, accepted all Dom Augustin’s personal ideas and innovations without surprise and without question. It does not seem to have occurred to him that there might be a fundamental difficulty involved in making a contemplative order do the work of an active order. Listening only to his own ardent love of souls and of the active apostolate, he allowed optimists to persuade him that it would be easy to get a Trappist monastery going in Nova Scotia.
His trust in this project was to weather some very severe storms. Tenacity is a Cistercian trait. Monks do not easily give up their ideals, once they have got a good grip on them, and one of the most tenacious Trappists that ever lived was Father Vincent de Paul Merle.
The summer months gave him time to visit the missions along the coast. When the winter of 1815 set in, Father Vincent, wearing his white Cistercian cowl and accompanied by three mysterious Negroes who had followed the monks from New York, entered the little village of Chezzetcook, where he settled down to two years of parish life.
The Acadian settlement of Chezzetcook, whose colonists were jealous of the traditions they had brought over from Normandy, must have been a pleasant little place. It preserved the atmosphere of a small Norman town, and the people soon developed a great devotion for their new pastor. He presided over all their public religious life and entered their Baptisms and Confirmations and weddings in the parish register, in which he signed his name and added “Priest and Religious of La Trappe.” Besides, since he was doing what he could to keep the austerities of his Rule, they came to hold his asceticism in great admiration.
Meanwhile, there was much to keep him busy. Long canoe voyages over treacherous waters, and tramps through the woods with an Indian guide brought him to outlying Micmac villages, where he preached and administered the Sacraments and taught catechism all day. At night he slept on a bed of branches, under a bearskin, while the rain came through the roof or the walls of the hut. It would have taken courage for a strong man to do all this: but Father Vincent’s health was not good. To add to the laborious life, he was having trouble learning the Indians’ language.
Unfortunately, the promised foundation was slow in materializing. The British government made no show of giving official permission, and Dom Augustin, far from offering any help, did not even answer Father Vincent’s letters. Least of all did Dom Augustin do anything about Father Vincent’s frantic appeals for a complete breviary. The poor man was leading a life that was in every respect semi-Cistercian, even down to the liturgy. For half the year he could recite the proper offices of each day. For the rest—including Advent and Lent—he had to make use of the Common or else borrow a Roman breviary from a secular priest.
In the winter of 1816–1817, when a letter from Dom Augustin suggested his return to France, Father Vincent asked for more time; but when this was granted, it had to be devoted primarily to the Indians. It was not until the spring of 1818, when he made a two-hundred-mile tour to Cape Breton and Antigonish, that he discovered a piece of property that suited him. It was a wooded valley half a mile from the sea, near a settlement called Big Tracadie. He wrote Dom Augustin a colorful description of it, calling the hills “mountains.” In October, when all the leaves had fallen from the trees and the cold winds were blowing down from Labrador with clouds full of snow, the Trappist pioneer bought these three hundred acres and put down on paper his notes on the projected Indian village, complete with school, workshops, farmlands, cooperative store, and so on; the village was to grow up in the shadow of the monastery that already existed in his mind. Not only that, but there would be a convent of Trappistines on the slope of the hill—with another school. All he needed now was some money to pay for the land, some buildings to put on it, and some monks to put into the building. Fortunately, one or two stalwart Irishmen expressed a desire to become monks, and this enabled him to write and tell Dom Augustin that “the foundation has been started” and that “postulants are beginning to come in.” He asked for a few monks from France, plans of regular monastery buildings, choir books, and all the rest.
Dom Augustin did not answer the letter. Months passed. When a year had gone by, Father Vincent tried again, with no better success. In 1820 and again in 1821 he returned to the charge. Since his letters are in the archives of La Trappe, Dom Augustin evidently received them. Either he did not know what to do about it, or else the answers went astray; in any case, Father Vincent was, practically speaking, abandoned in Nova Scotia, simply living the life of a missionary and dreaming about a monastery in his spare time.
In 1821, determined not to wait any longer, he actually took the first steps to organize his community of nuns. This consisted in sending three solid, healthy Acadian girls up the river to Montreal to make their noviceship in a convent of teaching sisters. After this they would take vows as “Trappistines.” However, he only intended them to keep the rules of Dom Augustin’s “Third Order,” which explains how he was able to get away with plans so charmingly vague.
In October, 1822, he took up his pen, told Dom Augustin all about what he had done, and intoned the same old refrain: “Please send me some monks from France, breviaries, rosaries, plans for a monastery. . . . ” This time he got a reply. Dom Augustin told him it was useless to start a foundation in Nova Scotia. Bishop Flaget of Bardstown was still anxious to have Trappists in Kentucky. In fact, he had offered them four hundred acres somewhere in that State. Therefore, the only thing to do was to sell out, send the “Trappistines” home to their mothers, and go to Kentucky.
La sainte volonté de Dieu!
It was not easy to do all this at once. In fact, going to Kentucky seemed out of the question. Instead, Father Vincent followed the advice of Archbishop Plessis, and in October, 1823, he sailed for France.
Dom Augustin was now nearing the end of his troubled and active career. The last years of his life were to be clouded with conflict and suspicion. The great odyssey had long since been left behind. Dom Augustin de Lestrange was a different man from the savior of the Strict Observance—the brilliant, even handsome, Trappist with a genius for adventure who carted his monks and nuns from one end of Europe to the other and ferried them back and forth across the Atlantic, making them keep the Val Sainte usages on riverboats and clippers, in covered wagons and under the trees of the forest. All this had given great scope for his energy, his imagination, his genius for making and changing plans on the spur of the moment. It had also demanded heroic dependence and the blindest possible obedience from his monks. Indeed, the only reasonable thing left for the Trappists to do, in the series of fantastic emergencies confronting them, had been to leave everything in the hands of the one man who could talk to everybody and find out about everything without breaking any of the Rules.
But now that things had settled down to their normal course, and the monks were back in France and established in regular monasteries, it was vitally necessary to return as far as possible to the peace and silence and tranquillity of the Cistercian life, to the traditional interpretation of St. Benedict’s Rule. In many cases Dom Augustin seems not to have understood the need for an adjustment. In his own mind and those of his followers the Val Sainte reform had come to be synonymous with “the Rule” and with “Cîteaux.” Everything else, even the obvious sense of St. Benedict and the old usages, was “relaxation.”
Great uneasiness arose among the Trappists. The monks began to split up into small, isolated congregations, each group trying to find a workable interpretation of the Rule and each one slightly suspicious of the others. Meanwhile, Dom Augustin had been summoned to Rome to explain many points about his administration.
The year 1823 had even brought misunderstandings between the abbot of La Trappe (to which Dom Augustin had returned when Napoleon went to St. Helena) and the Bishop of’S£ez. In fact, their relations became so strained that the entire community of La Trappe was now living at Bellefontaine, in another diocese.
It was here that Father Vincent found his major superior.
It was a winter evening. The monks were chanting Vespers in the shadows of a darkened choir. Most of them did not have the faintest idea who the old, gaunt, white-haired, used-up stranger was, when they made room for Father Vincent to take his rank of seniority among the veterans of the American campaign. Only when he was actually among them and standing in his stall, did Father Vincent’s neighbors recognize their old companion.
Dom Augustin was overjoyed to see him. It must have cheered him considerably to sit and listen to adventures that reminded him of his own best days. He encouraged Father Vincent to write it all down, and his heart was easily moved to reconsider the Kentucky project. When he heard about the Acadians and the Micmac missions and the “Trappistines,” he finally gave in and allowed Father Vincent to return to Nova Scotia and take with him enough monks to start at least the semblance of a monastery. They would be six in all, including Father Vincent himself. And he could not have been given a better subprior. Old Father Francis Xavier was a survivor of the Kentucky expedition. He had, in fact, made his vows in one of the log chapels built by the monks in America. He was a ferociously ardent supporter of the “reform” and had abandoned one of the less austere divisions of the Trappist family to throw in his lot with its strictest unit. Like Father Vincent, he was a man of one idea: and once that one idea had been sanctioned by Dom Augustin de Lestrange, it became the holy will of God and was therefore unchangeable.
The reformer of La Val Sainte sent these six men off to Nova Scotia armed with what is technically known as an “obedience”—a kind of monastic passport which serves as the monk’s official identification if he presents himself in some other monastery of the Order. Without it, he may be suspected of being out on French leave. The language of this particular document was typical of its writer. It was one of the last flourishes of the grand Val Sainte manner: “Inasmuch as you are inspired with the desire to bring the knowledge of God to a benighted pagan tribe, and in spite of the danger to your own lives, I order you to proceed on this journey. . . . ”
They sailed from Rochefort in a French man-of-war on May 10, 1823, and landed in Nova Scotia some thirty days later. It was a fair journey, but it ended in tragedy. Two of the monks fell into the bay as they tried to get into the rowboat to go ashore, and one of them was drowned. That left Father Vincent with four Trappists. His “Petit” Clairvaux was going to be very little indeed.
They settled in a little wooden building near the site Father Vincent had chosen five years before at Big Tracadie and began their official existence in the usual desperate poverty. They had no money, paying for commodities with potatoes, cabbages, and beef. The monks taught school, and the three sturdy Acadian girls who had gone to the novitiate in Montreal were summoned to Tracadie, dressed in habits, and placed in a little wooden house that had taken nine days to build. Thus, they were once again “Trappistines.”
When we read the documents that have survived from those days,2 it is almost incredible that Petit Clairvaux lasted as long as it did. Only the sincerity and personal heroism of the two men who were the life and soul of the monastery really kept it going. Their story is a strange phenomenon, a curious dead end in monastic history. Petit Clairvaux had to do without the vital support of a vigorous and thriving monastic organism, for the simple reason that it was an offshoot of a tree that was already dead. Father Vincent and Father Francis Xavier were trying to prolong the reform of La Val Sainte when the movement had become exhausted and needed only the death of its initiator before it collapsed and vanished entirely from the scene.
As the last gasp of the Val Sainte reform, however, Petit Clairvaux had something to say, without intending to do so, about the whole character of that reform. La Val Sainte had been an emergency measure. Like all emergency measures, it had many glaring imperfections: but during the time when it was needed, the vitality and austerity and sanctity of the monks compensated for the inherent weaknesses and disproportions of the reform. Now that Dom Augustin’s peculiarly active and energetic ideal had outlived its usefulness, the full stream of spiritual vitality which Divine Providence will always reserve for the contemplative Order of Cîteaux was once more flowing in its proper channel. And so, the mistakes of La Val Sainte lay fully exposed to view in the dry bones of what was called Petit Clairvaux.
The chief weakness of La Val Sainte was its essentially active spirit. The contemplative life came to mean little more than a complex of penitential exercises. If these were fulfilled—and it took plenty of action to carry them all out—then one was released from the obligation of cultivating a deep interior spirit of contemplation and could throw oneself wholeheartedly into teaching, preaching, missionary work, and the rest. That is why Father Vincent, like Dom Urban Guillet, did not fear to give everyone the impression that one of the chief objects of the Order was to educate the young. And that was why Dom Augustin had been so delighted at the project of the Indian village under Trappist tutelage.
At the moment, Father Vincent was living not at the monastery but in the presbytery which he had already occupied for so many years as parish priest of Tracadie. Father Francis Xavier was left in charge of the community and its school, but the only thing left of the Cistercian life was a bodily austerity that went beyond the limits of Cîteaux.
The first consequence of the lack of monastic regularity and enclosure and silence was that Petit Clairvaux was, for many years, the graveyard of contemplative vocations. In the end, no European abbot dared send anybody there. There was no interior life, and without interior life it is impossible to support the austerities of the Rule. One of the brothers, Bruno, grew tired of the monastery and went to live at the presbytery with Father Vincent. Then he tired of that and moved to a village school some miles away. Finally, he applied for a dispensation of his vows and got married. Another went back to Bellefontaine. A third, a doctor, spent most of his time practicing medicine and ranged so freely about the countryside, to the utter disregard of his monastic duties, that even Father Vincent was disconcerted. This doctor went back to France, but by that time no monastery could hold him, and he died an apostate. And that disposed of the original colony that had been sent out to Nova Scotia by Dom Augustin de Lestrange.
When the news of all this became known in the Order, Petit Clairvaux acquired a very unenviable reputation. After Dom Augustin’s death in 1827 no one wanted to have anything to do with the place, and it remained without an immediate superior or a mother house. Since this practically dissolved all official connection between Petit Clairvaux and the rest of the Order, Father Vincent and Father Francis Xavier went their own way, defending the fasts and austerities of La Val Sainte long after they had all been suppressed in the Order itself by the Holy See. An occasional friendly Irishman would give the life a trial, and this would persuade the two veterans that they really had a monastery to look after. Nevertheless, in 1836 Father Vincent went to Europe to beg a few professed Trappists from some of the best monasteries of the Order. Carefully avoiding Bellefontaine, where he was no longer persona grata, he went to La Grande Trappe, where he was in neutral territory. When the abbot tried to persuade him to give up Petit Clairvaux and return to a regular monastery and keep the Rule, he humbly agreed that this was a good idea; but later he presented his case to the heads of the Foreign Mission Seminary in Paris and the Propaganda 3in Rome and once again found himself in a position where it was the manifest will of God that he return to Nova Scotia.
He was back at Petit Clairvaux in 1840 after an absence of four years. This time the growth of the missions relieved him of the charge of parish priest, and he was able to retire to the monastery and live with the tiny community he had founded. Before he died, however, he retired to the convent of his “Trappistines” and settled down to await the call of God, surrounded by the devoted attentions of the sisters.
On January 1, 1853, there was a great stir among the Indians on Cape Breton Island. One of the braves came running into the village to report an ominous piece of news. There was a tree that had been marked by Father Vincent years before and had thus become associated with his person. It was “his tree.” On this midwinter day it had suddenly fallen to the ground without any apparent cause, as if it had been struck by lightning. The Indians at once decided that Father Vincent must be dead—and that was, in fact, the day of his death.
He had been venerated as a saint even during his lifetime. Now his cult spread all over Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. All kinds of stories were told about him, some of them plausible enough, others more or less legendary, like the “miracle” in which he stopped a great storm by taking off his shoe and throwing it into the sea. Miraculous cures were claimed by people who had prayed at his tomb, and Bishop Cameron of Arichat testified, thirty years after Father Vincent’s death, that a Protestant was still living who claimed to have been saved from death by a prayer to the Nova Scotia Trappist.
Meanwhile, Mother Ann Coté, the superioress of Father Vincent’s “Trappistines,” declared that he had worked “an infinite number of miracles” and that she was not unwilling to part with relics—a finger of one of Father’s gloves, a lock of Father’s hair, and a bit of paper on which he had written something. The General Chapter of the Reformed Cistercians, in 1903, even considered the possibility of introducing his cause: but the matter went no further.
Father Francis Xavier assumed charge of the monastery, but it soon became clear that Petit Clairvaux could not survive unless some monks came from Europe. He appealed to the Belgian Trappists, and a colony was sent from St. Sixte, under a Father James, in 1857. They introduced regular observance, and at once the original flow of vitality from Cistercian centers in Europe began to stimulate the little Nova Scotia community. For the first time in its existence it began to prosper in the spiritual and temporal orders at the same time. The only unfortunate element was that the Belgian Trappists followed the usages not of La Val Sainte, or even of twelfth-century Cîteaux, but of De Ranc£, and this was far too tame for Father Francis Xavier. He therefore followed the road his predecessor had taken a few years before and retired to the “Trappistines,” where he could fast as much as he pleased.
With the arrival of the Belgian Trappists, Petit Clairvaux took on an altogether new aspect. It was once more admitted to the Cistercian Order as a daughter house of Our Lady of Gethsemani, which had been founded in Kentucky in 1848. The monks enlarged their farm, built mills and workshops, and put up one of the largest barns in Nova Scotia, with room for a hundred cattle. The Trappists made butter and cheese that fetched the highest price in the markets of the province. They burned bricks and built themselves a simple, rugged monastery around a cloister garth, according to the Cistercian tradition. In 1866 the community numbered forty-five members, but most of these had come from Belgium. The Nova Scotia Catholics, although they had great admiration for the monks, did not seem to want to join them.
In 1862 Petit Clairvaux made a foundation of its own in the Province of Quebec. This, too, had been one of the dreams of Father Vincent de Paul Merle; but Archbishop Turgeon of Quebec had had to restrain the ambitious pioneer by practically forbidding him to accept land that was offered him at Saint Joachim at a time when he could hardly keep his microscopic community alive at Tracadie. Even in 1862 the foundation of Our Lady of the Holy Ghost was premature. Four monks were sent from Nova Scotia to Longevin Township, in Dorchester County, near the Maine border. They built themselves a temporary monastery—the usual log cabin—in which they suffered incredible hardships when winter came. Nevertheless, the community lasted ten years and even began to show signs of prospering: at one point it had twenty-two members. It is not quite clear why the project was suddenly dropped in 1872.
More peculiar still, this monastery of the Holy Ghost tried to make a foundation of its own in the United States. It was the monastery of the Immaculate Conception, founded at Old Monroe, Missouri, a settlement of German farmers. But not much could be expected of this rather temperamental project, which had sprung into existence from the restless mind of a certain Father Gerard Furstenburg. This monk had made his vows at the French monastery of Mont des Cats but was unable to get along there. He found his way to the Holy Ghost monastery, but he did not settle down any too comfortably there, either. The superior sent him on a begging tour in the States, perhaps more to be rid of him than to raise money. Father Gerard managed to persuade two or three Trappists to live with him in Missouri, and there he started to put up a chapel. Unfortunately, he embroiled himself in more trouble here than he had ever had to face before. The nominal “Catholics” of the district were not all in favor of Trappist monks, and when he preached an inflammatory sermon against their rather wild entertainments, one of their number who happened to be drunk at the time came around after the sermon and threw a hatchet at him. Two members of the Trappist community seized the drunkard and held him down until he was in a better mood. He then went off and filed suit against them for assault and battery. The lawyer whom he retained to prosecute the monks delivered a terrific barrage of invective against the Trappists, referring to them as “the bears of the forest” and declaring that they were all worthy of death. In spite of his eloquence, however, the case was dismissed.
In 1875, three years after the Holy Ghost monastery itself had closed down, this Missouri foundation was abandoned as hopeless. Father Gerard, rather than return to Petit Clairvaux, went to Gethsemani. He stayed for a year or two and then wandered off once more to new horizons. Toward the end of the century he was once again seen in the United States, this time trying to collect money for a Trappist foundation in the East Indies.4
The wandering life of this unhappy figure is not something that comes up very frequently in the history of the Trappists—and since the introduction of the new Code of Canon Law the species has died out.
Meanwhile, the thirty-odd years of quiet prosperity that had given Petit Clairvaux the distinction of becoming an abbey5 suddenly ended with a disaster on the Feast of St. Francis, October 4, 1892. On that day a fire started in one of the old wooden buildings put up by Father Vincent de Paul. It quickly spread to the roof of the main monastery. The roof was so high that no ladder could reach it, and the fire got out of control. In a few hours the monastery was a heap of evil-smelling ruins. The monks spent the next four years in wooden shacks, suffering greatly during the winters. Nevertheless, they set about rebuilding the monastery. Before this work was half finished another fire broke out in 1896, this time destroying the temporary wooden monastery in which they were trying to live, as well as the great barn and other farm buildings.
They were by now almost completely ruined, but the monks moved into the unfinished shell of the brick monastery, where they lived in abject misery. In 1898 the General Chapter transferred them to the jurisdiction of Our Lady of the Lake, whose prior, Father John Mary Murphy, moved the whole community to Rhode Island, as we shall see in a later chapter.
The shell of Petit Clairvaux remained empty for live years and was taken over by the abbey of Thymadeuc in Britanny. It was occupied in 1903 by twelve monks, with instructions to prepare it as a “refuge” in case the Order was expelled from France. Petit Clairvaux remained an annex of Thymadeuc until 1919, when it was closed down. The threat against the orders in France seemed to have passed, and there were no vocations in Nova Scotia.
The building again became empty. In 1937 it was bought by its present occupants, the Augustinian fathers, as a refuge for members of their order expelled from Nazi Germany.