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.
No doubt, there were some rough spots at first. The rigidity of Frater Maxime’s nature did not become supple and pliant all at once: yet there were surprisingly few exaggerations. True, in times of trial, the young Cistercian could be overcome by an extremely pessimistic view of his own failings, and he was perhaps too quick to proclaim himself the “worst sinner in the world.” That is a statement which too many novices try to make, and which few of them succeed in pronouncing with any degree of conviction.
Practices of this kind have a strongly human tone about them, and they lend themselves singularly well to strain and scrupulosity when carried too far. They were in favor at La Trappe in De Ranch’s heyday. At Chimay, Frater Maxime quickly outgrew them. Instead of encumbering his spiritual life with imaginative tricks and complexities of method and device, he soon came to that general and peaceful awareness of God which never reached a very precise definition but which grew from day to day and created an aura of peace about him in which he lived and moved and performed all the actions of the monastic day.
It was the normal and logical fruition of the Rule of St. Benedict: a humility that concentrated not on his own self and its miseries but on the greatness and nearness of God, the constant presence of His indispensable grace and the action of His will in all things. Walking the paths of simplicity, humility, obedience, love, Frater Maxime eventually began to live on a completely different level—in a spiritual climate that was altogether new.
One day he realized suddenly that he was a new man. He had learned the real meaning of God’s love, and he saw that, until then, he had been crawling along the ground, while now he seemed to fly. Before, he had struggled along by his own efforts, without ever achieving more than a negligible success. Now, the work had been so much lightened that he did not seem to work at all. On the contrary, it seemed that everything was being done for him. All he had to do was abandon himself, give his consent, yield up his confident love, and God in return flooded his soul with grace. Je sens l’amour qui m’envahit (“I feel myself invaded by love”), he wrote, “a love that is very tender, very sweet, and carries one away. . . . Somehow, I don’t quite know how it was, my soul entered upon a state in which all its desires seemed to be fulfilled. It enjoyed the delight of resting in a feeling of secret happiness. I felt myself to be under the eyes of God, and that they were fixed upon me. I discovered a great facility for loving God in my neighbor and for seeing Him in all things and I no longer did anything except in order to give Him glory. His love became everything to me and I forgot all the rest. . . . ”
The context in which these lines were written shows them to be something deeper than the passing sensible consolations of a beginner. The young Cistercian had entered upon the ways of infused prayer; he had been drawn into the close and intimate control of the Holy Spirit and was now in the strict sense a contemplative. His Cistercian vocation had flowered to a rich maturity.
Yet, infused contemplation is only the beginning of a long road. It is not the reward for consummate sanctity: it is a powerful, perhaps even an essential, means to help us attain sanctity.1
Having tasted the first clean and intoxicating joys that come with the gift of wisdom, Frater Maxime Carlier entered into the state of passive purification in which the real work of the contemplative life is accomplished. It became impossible for him to pray, yet the need for prayer, for union with God, became a hunger that devoured him to the very roots of his soul. Unable to understand his impotency, he nevertheless remained at peace, was held in a state of confused, obscure resignation. Sometimes this mixture of peace and aridity was deepened and enlightened by a strong sense of the actual presence of the Blessed Virgin, who played a dominant role as Frater Maxime’s spiritual guide and took charge of his mystical formation: an office which belongs to her, above all others, as the Queen of Contemplatives.
On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1913, he made his simple profession, pronouncing his temporary vows in the chapter room of Chimay. His dispositions could be summed up in the two words ovis occisionis. He was offering himself entirely to Christ as a sheep for the slaughter. “I no longer belong to myself in anything,” he wrote. “Total abandonment. Let me remain in Thy hands, O my God! Do with me whatever Thou wilt!”
And the God of heaven replied to that challenge with a demand that was terrible.
One day in July, 1914, a messenger came to the silent Cistercian abbey with the news of the declaration of war. Frater Maxime was one of the first to go. The Church in France and Germany had not wished to insist on the rights of clerics and religious to be exempt from military service, because such an insistence would only mean trouble, suppressions, expulsions.
On August 2, Frater Maxime knelt in the muddy road to receive the blessing of his abbot while rain poured down on the drab fields of a Belgium that was already invaded. Soyez bon soldat! (“Be a good soldier!”) were the words he carried with him to the barracks in Lille.
His own answer was: “The Justice of God demands victims. I am going to be one of them.”
But what a sacrifice! It was more than the long, drawn-out immolation of a bodily life, more than the acceptance of all the hardships and sufferings and degradation of trench warfare that dragged on month after month and year after year.
Within a few days Sergeant Carlier was at the front. But the Germans had the advantage all along the line in Belgium, and orders were given for a general withdrawal. The French army began an immense retreat. As they retired before the advance of the enemy, the soldier who was also the Cistercian monk, Frater Maxime, soon recognized familiar landmarks. Long before they got there, he knew that his retreating section would pass right through the monastery farm of Chimay!
Soon they were actually in a wood that was sanctified by the memories of silent workdays, and he could still hear the ringing of the axe that had accompanied the deep, peaceful prayers in the soul of the novice he had once been. As they emerged from the wood, his heart knew every step of the way that could have taken him across the fields to the abbey, whose slim white spire rose up over the trees and the cluster of slate roofs. But his orders made it impossible. He could only gaze across the fields which had once grown to be almost part of him, to the place from which he had been so violently uprooted. His brethren were there still, except for fifteen or more who had been called, like himself, to the army. But he could not even stop and say a word to them, exchange an embrace, a sign of affection, a demand for prayers. . . .
He wrote afterward: “For a long, long time, right up to the moment when we went over the rise, I remained with my eyes fixed upon the abbey where I had so hoped to end my days.”
One would think it rather unkind of God to drive home His hard demand with such obvious bluntness: but Maxime Carlier was able to understand what it was all about. This was his sacrifice. It was the greatest thing he had to give: the security of his monastery, his very vocation itself and even his hopes of becoming a saint as a contemplative monk. But these are precisely the things that God demands in sacrifice from the ones whom He means to lead to perfection by the contemplative road. They have to be ready to suffer with equanimity the terrifying loss of all that seems to constitute the indispensable means to perfection, and let God alone lead them, in darkness and emptiness, to their end.
Frater Maxime’s true vocation was to become a contemplative in the trenches by living his Cistercian life, as best he could, on the battlefield. His sanctity was to consist in suffering the darkness of passive purification amid the chaos and cruelty of organized slaughter, and in passing through all this in the spirit of a monk of St. Benedict. Like all the other Cistercian monks who had had to go to war with him, Frater Maxime Carlier had a very definite mission from God: a mission of sacrifice, first of all, and an apostolate of example.
His sacrifice was one of atonement, and the love with which he accepted the physical and mental sufferings both of a soldier and of a mystic was intended by God as a holocaust of reparation for the sins of all those who had brought this war upon mankind by their greed and their lust. In the furnace of these trials his soul was brought, without his ever knowing it, to a degree of perfect interior purity and selflessness that reacted profoundly on everyone who came in contact with him.
What was true of Maxime Carlier was true, in proportion, of all the other monks of the Cistercian Order in the war, and of all the other religious and all those who shared his faith and his love of God.
For the next three years the young monk passed through most of the hardest fighting in the war. He was twice wounded and was decorated for bravery with the Croix de guerre. This mystic was astonishingly cool under fire, and the whole record of his military life, which has come down to us in considerable detail, is the story of a powerful and well-balanced soul. His long letters describe the fighting with all the vividness and objectivity of the most dispassionate artist. If he had wanted to do so and had lived long enough, Frater Maxime Carlier would have been capable of writing one of the greatest books about that war.
The secret of his courage and unshaken balance and undimmed clarity of mind and firmness of will is to be found not only in his nature but, above all, in his Cistercian spirit. In the soul of Maxime Carlier the war was putting the Rule of St. Benedict to the test. The devil was trying to break a soul that had been formed by that Rule. But the devil suffered defeat.
Frater Maxime’s secret was his faith in the presence of God. When seventy-fives were blasting all around him and German machine guns were making the earth jump and dance before his feet, Maxime Carlier was in the presence of God and clinging to God’s will by obeying blindly the orders of his military superiors. These two things, obedience and the presence of God, the two foundation stones of Benedictine spirituality, were absolutely all he had left. Everything else had been taken away. He could not pray. Even in quiet sectors or behind the lines or on furlough he was never able to pray in a way that made sense. Yet the immense, insatiable need for prayer kept driving him into the half-ruined churches they came upon in the fighting. There, he would kneel like a blind and dumb creature and turn his paralyzed mind to the Crucifix and remain fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour, in impotent and anguished silence. Then he was out again on the road or in the trenches.
One Christmas night his men were camping in an unmolested wood, and Frater Maxime seized the opportunity to slip out of the hut. From nine to midnight he thought about the monks who were chanting the vigils of the feast in the monastic choir of his beloved Chimay; he walked up and down, fingering his rosary under the bare branches and the icy stars. Convalescing from his wounds, he had even better opportunities to pray—on the rocks by the sea at Biarritz and even in two Cistercian monasteries where he spent a few weeks: Our Lady of the Desert, near Toulouse, and Our Lady of Sept-Fons. But always the same aridity and helplessness pursued him. It was the dark night of a perfect sacrifice—the dark night of a contemplation too pure for human taste or sight, too pure for emotion, and God was supporting him constantly in the most difficult circumstances by what could only be a moral miracle.
When the work of this purification was done, and when God was content to call the sacrifice complete, it ended in one swift and merciful stroke.
Frater Maxime was ready to go on furlough. He should have left his men hours before, but he remained with them out of charity until the very last minute. Just as he was about to start for the rear sector, a German bombardment opened up, and one of the first shells came screaming down upon the shelter where he was. His practiced ear must have told him, a fraction of a second before the explosion, that this was going to be a direct hit, and his supple, purified will had time for that last act of love, of self-oblation to the will of the ever-present God.
And then the veils of faith were suddenly shattered, and the noise of the world ended forever, as the Cistercian soldier entered into the sounding silence of a contemplation without obscurity and without end.
The story of Frater Maxime Carlier was also the story of all the Cistercian abbeys in the war area. Like the monk who had to be a soldier and who had to struggle to keep hold of the pure essentials of the interior life, many monasteries and convents had to bid farewell to contemplation. All were affected to some extent. Sept-Fons remained well behind the lines. Twenty-one of its monks and lay brothers were under arms by 1915. Dom Chautard, their abbot, with characteristic energy and charity, sought them out even in the front lines, finding his way through all the barriers of military red tape with a Red Cross arm band on his overcoat. He had a hand in starting a special magazine for mobilized priests and contributed regularly to it. Meanwhile, Sept-Fons had opened its doors to refugee Trappists from Belgium, to the orphans from a bombed asylum at Arras, to the inmates of an old men’s home, and to the monks of their own daughter house in Palestine, El Athroun, which had been closed by the Turks.
The situation at Sept-Fons was typical. Every monastery and convent in France had either refugees or wounded soldiers under its roof. Besides that, the monks who were not mobilized left their enclosures to help in parish work, and the rest not only ran their own monastery farms but helped their neighbors as well. In many parts of France the Trappistine nuns helped their peasant neighbors bring in their wheat and wielded pitchforks with dexterity and energy in the sweet-smelling fields of hay. It was work to which they were accustomed, but it was not quite the usual thing for them to come out and do it in public.
Most of the French monasteries suffered heavily from mobi-lizations; the most important houses, like La Trappe and Melleray, had approximately one quarter of their personnel under arms. However, they were not all combatants. There were not a few chaplains among them, and more Cistercians served in the medical corps than as combatants. So, Providence saw to it that most of these contemplatives were spared the degradation of shedding human blood and were allowed the privilege of serving Christ in the wounded and the suffering.
The Belgian monasteries were, in a sense, better off. Westmalle had only two priests mobilized, and both were chaplains. Chimay was soon isolated in German-occupied territory, and therefore only those who went to the army in the very first days of the war, with Frater Maxime, were actually mobilized. However, in 1916 the Germans took twenty-two members of the community and led them off into Germany for forced labor, so Chimay suffered, too.
Another monastery was in the center of fierce fighting. Mont des Cats, in the Lille sector, was bombarded and gutted by fire.
Saint-Sixte, in the Poperinghe sector in Belgium, was also destroyed but rose from its ruins after 1918. Igny, the monastery where Huysmans used to seek refuge from the noise of Paris, was turned into a hospital for contagious cases and was finally wiped out. When peace returned, it was altogether rebuilt, and a much more complete and regular monastery rose up in the quiet Champagne valley, over the ruins of what had been nothing but a seventeenth-century manor house: but this time it was turned over to Cistercian nuns. Igny is now one of the most fervent Trappistine convents.
Just as Frater Maxime had fought even harder to preserve the spirit of prayer than he had fought to keep the Germans away from Paris, so too the Cistercian Order did everything in its power to maintain the religious spirit of its mobilized monks. And no one devoted himself more effectively to this work than Dom Anselme Le Bail. Frater Maxime’s novice master had become abbot of Chimay, but he too had soon been mobilized. He went into the army as a chaplain, and for most of the war he maintained a sort of field headquarters of Cistercian spirituality in Compiegne. He collected a number of books on theology, asceticism, the liturgy, Scripture, and so on and held them in readiness to lend to any Cistercian soldier who wrote in for them. But what was more important, Dom Anselme edited and wrote a small mimeographed magazine called Le Moine Soldat. It came out every fortnight and was made up of three sections. The first was a combination of the Cistercian menology and Ordo, reminding the soldiers of the progress of the liturgical cycle and of the saints commemorated from day to day. There were also brief sentences on the chapters of the Rule that every Cistercian would normally hear commented on by his abbot in chapter every morning. This was followed by meditations on the liturgy and by a third section which was mainly ascetical and which tackled the immense task of keeping the spirit of Cistercian monasticism alive in the hearts of men who were up to their knees in mud and filth, devoured by vermin, and engaged in the task of hunting one another down like animals.
When the armistice finally came and the cannons were silent and the military chaplain cleared the shelves at Compiegne of their frayed volumes, leaving the town to the great men who signed a certain document in a •wagon-lit in that very place, the Cistercian Order recovered its balance and its normal existence and went on as if nothing had ever happened to disturb it. There were a few vacant places in monastic choirs when communities once more reassembled; but on the whole, there was no reason for the Trappists to sing a lamentation over their lot. The General Chapter once more began to assemble at Cîteaux, the normal way of the contemplative life was soon resumed, and monasteries that had been obliged to help in the secular ministry during the emergency gradually withdrew their men once again into the cloister. The Order itself began to advance in fervor and prosperity as never before since the reunion of the congregations. Indeed, it seemed that the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, far from being scattered by the storm over Europe, acquired a firmer cohesion and struck their roots deeper than ever into the ground.
The 1920’s saw Dom Edmond Obrecht’s zenith at Gethsemani. The year 1924 was an unforgettable date in the abbey’s history. The Triple Jubilee celebration was Dom Edmond’s triumph. One of the jubilees was, of course, the diamond jubilee of the foundation of Gethsemani, which really came at the end of 1923. The celebration was postponed until the following spring and amalgamated with two of Dom Edmond’s personal feasts: his fiftieth year as a Cistercian and his twenty-fifth anniversary as abbot of Gethsemani.
In the depths of his expansive heart there was nothing Dom Edmond Obrecht liked better than a big, colorful celebration. In that sense he was definitely a man of his time, and the Triple Jubilee at Gethsemani was, more than anything else, an expression of the fact that the Trappists had caught up with their times and were willing to display some of the booming optimism that flooded the whole of America in the 1920’s.
Gethsemani, in 1924, was the ideal size for a Cistercian community. Its eighty-one members were evenly divided between professed monks and lay brothers. There were only a handful of novices, it is true, but the community was just big enough to keep most of the members from being overworked, without being so big that the abbot could not keep his finger on everything that was going on. It was now a thoroughly homogeneous “American” community, although there were still many monks who had come from distant countries to end their days in Kentucky. Above all, it was a regular, industrious, serious community of men who worked willingly for an abbot who made them work hard; they gave themselves wholeheartedly to an obscure and grueling quest for sanctity in the silence and poverty and all the vicissitudes of Trappist life.
Perhaps the outstanding accomplishment of Dom Edmond’s regime in the spiritual order was in bringing Gethsemani finally under the unchallenged dominance of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and her “Little Way.”
The Little Flower had had her devotees in the house since long before World War I. The undermaster of choir novices, Father Anthony, was a monk from an aristocratic Catholic family in Holland. His father, Senator James de Bruijn, had been made a Papal Chamberlain by Leo XIII, and his sister was a nun in a contemplative order in Italy. It was she who sent the first copy of The Story of a Soul ever to enter the citadel of ruthless severity that was La Trappe de Gethsemani. From that time on, the spirituality of the little Carmelite saint, who has exercised such a tremendous influence in the Church in our times, impressed itself upon the spiritual élite of the Kentucky abbey, and especially upon its prior. Dom Edmond was interested, but his interest changed to enthusiasm when the newly canonized St. Thérèse cured him of a dangerous illness in 1925.
Dom Edmond had gone, as usual, to the General Chapter but had been struck down by an almost fatal heart attack before the Chapter opened. He barely managed to find his way to his old family home in Alsace, where he was confined to bed for several months, unable even to say Mass.
The illness of one so prominent was a matter of consternation to the whole Order, and a stream of abbots and dignitaries came to visit Dom Edmond in his native village. The Bishop of Strasbourg even made him an honorary canon of his cathedral. The local villagers, in their turn, came to serenade him with a brass band outside his window. But even that did not kill Dom Edmond.
As he lay in bed, too exhausted even to greet his visitors, he placed all his confidence in a relic of the Little Flower—a lock of her hair—which he kept over the head of his bed. When he finally got on his feet again, his first important journey was a pilgrimage to Lisieux.
Then he boarded the liner for America and finally reached Gethsemani. The monks had never expected to see him again alive. In fact, they did not know how fortunate they were: on his recovery Dom Edmond had tried to resign his charge, but his resignation was not accepted by the Abbot General.
The years that followed, 1927 and 1928, were both marked by pilgrimages to Lisieux: and Dom Edmond Obrecht was no ordinary pilgrim! He not only entered the sacred enclosure of Carmel, armed with special permission from Rome, but he conversed with St. Thérèse’s three living sisters, cementing with them a warm and lasting friendship. And he not only became their friend; he was officially adopted into the family.
As a result, the Cistercians of Gethsemani and the Carmelites of Lisieux have become brothers and sisters in an especially close sense. The various feasts of each year witness an exchange of greetings and gifts and all the charming courtesies so characteristic of the daughters of St. Theresa. Gethsemani has by no means suffered from this Providential exposure to the warmth and playfulness and finesse of the Carmelites, who so well know how to temper their austerity with good humor.
There can be no doubt that this warmth from across the ocean did something to thaw out the vestiges of chilliness that still lurked in corners of this big, bare Kentucky abbey. More than that, it was after St. Thérèse was appointed ex officio novice mistress at Gethsemani that the astonishing flood of vocations began to come in. . . .
Camel’s new saint had not ended her favors for Dom Edmond when she cured him in France in 1925. Eight years later, after an automobile accident near Gethsemani in which, by rights, everybody should have been killed in the head-on collision, Dom Edmond developed a gangrenous foot. It soon became so serious that the doctor feared he would have to amputate it. But among the abbot’s other ailments there was a diabetic condition which made the operation impossible. The community began a novena to the Little Flower, and the father prior slipped a relic of hers into the bandage he put on the abbot’s foot.
The next day, he walked in and found the doctor scratching his head and trying to work out some explanation for the fact that the old abbot was out of danger and his foot on the way to being healed. That was in 1933.
Dom Edmond’s course was nearly run. Sleepless nights and a body full of pain left the aged Trappist without rest or strength, yet he insisted on going to the General Chapter and making an emergency visit to Our Lady of the Valley, where Dom John was seriously ill. Finally, as 1934 drew on, he had to be altogether confined to his room. His last appearance among his monks was typical. It was November 1, the Feast of All Saints. Dom Edmond came to the morning chapter to address the community, a thing he was seldom able to do in these last days. He made an important change in the officers of the community, and that evening he appeared for the last time in choir. He entered the church in the purple cappa magna granted him in 1929 by Pius XI, on the occasion of his golden jubilee as a priest. During the second Vespers of the great feast he sat in the choir of the infirm but stepped into his stall to give the blessing after the benedicamus Domino. Then he remained to chant the Vespers of the Dead for the solemn anniversary of All Souls.
Two weeks later he received Extreme Unction, in his room, from the hands of the prior. He managed to live until Christmas and into the new year, but when the monks were entering choir for Prime at five-thirty on the morning of January 4, the prior beckoned them to come quickly to the abbot’s room.
The great man died with his monks around him, reciting the prayers for the agonizing.
Many of the Church dignitaries who had applauded Dom Edmond’s wit at the Triple Jubilee banquet were once again at Gethsemani on the cold, rainy, January day when his body was lowered into the earth in a nook behind the chapel of Our Lady of Victories, in the apse of the abbey church where he had usually said Mass.
While the eddies of excitement were dying down in the Catholic press of two continents, the monks of Gethsemani prepared for the election of their fifth abbot. Early in February Dom Corentin Guyader, the father immediate, arrived from Melleray, and the vote was taken with all the prescribed formalities. Not much balloting was required to choose as their new superior for life the man who had been Dom Edmond’s prior for over thirty years.
Dom Frederic Dunne was the first American to become a Trappist abbot. He was also, incidentally, the first American who came to Gethsemani as a choir monk and actually stayed there until death. In doing so, he buried many others who had entered the novitiate after him. Before his own life ended, full of years and merits, on August 4, 1948, he not only had seen more than half of Gethsemani’s hundred years but had played a dominant part in his half of the abbey’s history.
Dom Frederic had entered the monastery in 1894, when he was twenty. Physically speaking, he was not a very promising prospect: his build was slight, he was not tall or muscular. Dom Edward, who was then abbot, recognized at once the intelligence and religious fervor of his new postulant, who described himself in the monastery records as a printer and bookbinder. That was the trade his father had exercised, first in Zanesville and Ironton, Ohio, then in Atlanta, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida. While Frater Frederic was still a young monk, his father followed him to Gethsemani and spent the last years of his life in the habit of a lay-brother oblate. Mr. Dunne brought with him a small hand printing press and some type and everything needed to bind a book. During the course of his long and extremely busy monastic career, Father Frederic found time to bind many of the books in the library.
“Busy” is scarcely the word for his life. Dom Frederic’s labors for the monastery were something monumental. The natural generosity of his soul and the intense nervous energy generated in his wiry frame are not sufficient to explain the persistence and the effectiveness with which he kept Gethsemani going, sometimes single handed, for so many years.
He entered the monastery at a crucial moment. The monks, ignorant of the English language or of the ways of the world, or both, and divided among themselves in a community that was unbalanced and ill at ease, were closer to ruin than they realized. Dom Edward quickly discerned the blessing that had come to his monastery in this intelligent and willing worker: and it did not take him long to make use of him. He put Frater Frederic to work long before he should have done so. Even before the poor boy got well into his novitiate, he was appointed sacristan: and then he was barely professed when the whole house was turned upside down by the trouble at Gethsemani College, the public scandal surrounding the arrest of the principal, Dom Edward’s resignation, and the confusion that followed.
It was young Frater Frederic who was sent up to the school to take charge of everything, to go over the books, to find out how much the ex-principal had managed to embezzle, and afterward to set things right and try to steer the school back into the proper spiritual and financial channels. It was not a bad assignment for a boy of twenty-two. But it was one that had its dangers. After all, the young monk was taken out of the community before he was fully formed. He had to live at the college, and he came down to the monastery only at rare intervals. He was a contemplative only in desire. The fact that he managed to preserve such an intense and ardent interior life all that time bears witness to the fervor and power of that desire! For, although he was at the same time one of the youngest and most overworked men in the house, Frater Frederic was also one of the most spiritual.
Underlying a natural courage and tenacity that could be pushed to the limits of heroism by his iron will, Frater Frederic burned with deep and smoldering supernatural fires, and his was the union of grace and temperament that produces Trappist saints. He was a Trappist in all the rigor of his love for the Rule, in all his uncompromising asceticism and love of penance: but he was more than Trappist in his ardent love of Christ, a love that had something of the fire of St. Bernard and St. Gertrude the Great. This love was the supernatural secret of his tireless devotion to Gethsemani and to all who have lived there in the last fifty years or have come within the radius of the Trappists’ influence. And beyond that, his love went out to embrace the whole world, for this contemplative, like St. Theresa of Avila, like Thérèse of Lisieux, had the soul of a great apostle.
All his life was centered upon the altar and Christ in the tabernacle. The Blessed Sacrament, the Sacred Heart were his contemplation: if his thoughts turned at every moment from his work to Christ on the Cross, it was only to return again to this unending immolation of work which was to consume his life in sacrifice. Father Frederic loved books and he loved prayer. He had no relish for society and for the business and functions of men. Perhaps few people ever realized how much it cost him to sacrifice so many hours and days in his long life to material things, to contact with the world, to conversations with visitors, and to errands outside the monastery.
Dom Edmond, of course, had found him invaluable. He had him ordained as fast as he decently could and appointed him prior. After that, during Dom Edmond’s long absences in Europe, Africa, and Asia, it was Father Frederic who ran things at Gethsemani. Quietly, efficiently, without fuss or noise, submitting everything he could to the judgment of his abbot, Father Frederic found the secret of doing many jobs extremely well—and letting all the credit go to somebody else.
By the time he was elected abbot, he was thoroughly prepared to be not only abbot but everything else: all during his abbotship Dom Frederic carried out most of the functions of cellarer as well. Here again, it was a question of generous sacrifice. He knew how much it cost to go out and do business in the world, and he wanted to spare any one of his monks from such a trial.
The first American-born Cistercian abbot entered upon his new charge in an hour of severe trials; the Providence of God was evidently preparing him and his community for the years of hard work and expansion that were soon to come. On February 7, the day after Dom Frederic Dunne’s election, several members of the community who had fallen ill with Spanish influenza had to be isolated. In spite of all the efforts of the local doctor, the contagion spread rapidly through the community. In a few days Father James Fox, the infirmarian, had half the community on his hands in the small monastic infirmary built years before by Dom Edmond. But the monks did not realize the danger of the situation until Father Columban and Brother Placid both died on February 15. While they were being buried on the 16th, Father Anselm died, an eighty-six-year-old Irish monk. More and more of the Trappists fell ill until finally only twenty were left standing to carry on the regular life of the community and look after the others. The infirmary was taking on some of the aspects of a pesthouse, and there seemed to be nothing anyone could do about it. Father Anthony died on the 18th, followed by Brother Michael two days later. By this time the news of the epidemic was all over the countryside, and it was Bishop Floersh in Louisville who finally brought relief to Gethsemani. He appealed to Chicago for help, and two Alexian brothers were sent at once to Kentucky from their Chicago hospital to nurse the sick Trappists. Meanwhile, the monks were moved out of the infirmary into the top floor of the guest house, where the disease was finally checked, with the loss of one more patient, Brother Matthias. Later on, two more died of pneumonia.
The Requiem Masses were sung over the bodies of all these victims by Dom Corentin—a sad task for a father immediate who had come to install a new abbot in his daughter house. For, while all this was going on, the regular visitation was also being held, and confirmation of the election arrived from Cîteaux. Those who were able to get around on February 18 knelt before their new reverend father in the chapter room and renewed their vows, promising him obedience until death.
However, weeks went by, and the monks were able to finish Lent in the usual rigor. May 1 saw the abbatial blessing of the new superior, and that September he attended his first General Chapter. By November the community entered full swing upon the new program of works that had to be undertaken and began excavating a cellar under the monumental, thick-walled east wing of the abbey, built three-quarters of a century before by the pioneers.
Behind the peaceful walls of the Kentucky abbey, no one thought much of the events that were beginning to cause a stir in the newspapers as the year 1936 progressed. Only a rumor reached the Trappists that the February elections in Spain had put in power a regime under which the Church began to feel the pressure of a savage persecution. In the summer it was heard that Spain was on fire with civil war.
Cistercians don’t know anything about politics and they did not become much involved in the confusions that clouded the minds of so many others in America. They did not realize that what was taking shape in Spain was really the prelude to a vast international conflict, a new world war on a scale more extensive and more terrible than anything that had ever been known before. They did not hear how the armies and air forces of Italy and Germany on one side and of the Communist International on the other were making this Spanish Civil War a field of maneuvers, a practice campaign before the real thing began. But what they did hear was that thousands of priests and religious were being taken out and killed and that churches and monasteries were being burned.
And so, even though they did not understand politics, these monks grasped one fundamental truth about the Spanish Civil War: that it was essentially religious. The various twentieth-century religions had come to be badly mixed up, but in this conflict—with Fascism and Nazism on one side, and with Communism on the other—it was still essentially a war of modern godlessness against God and against the Catholic Church. That some of the Church’s worst enemies happened, for the time being, to be fighting on Franco’s side may have obscured the issue but did nothing to change the fact. At the same time the claims of a tolerant “liberalism,” which theoretically hoped for religious freedom under the Popular Front, did not alter the facts. Therefore, in practice, the Cistercian monasteries in Nationalist Spain were not molested. The only one that had the misfortune to be stranded in the province of Santander, controlled by the Popular Front, suffered the fate that was to be expected.
Our Lady of Viaceli had been built in 1901 as a house of refuge for the southern French monastery of Our Lady of the Desert, near Toulouse. It was another child of the Waldeck-Rousseau anti-Catholic legislation in France. In the thirty-five years of its existence the community had done quite well for itself and had made a foundation in the province of Soria, Santa Maria de Huerta.
After the February elections of 1936 the monks of Viaceli began to hear of churches being burned in their province, but they were not visited by the F.A.I. until after the July uprising. First of all, they were “investigated.” That is to say, groups of Reds walked in and started pushing them around with rifles and revolvers and asking them questions, as if to give a semijudicial character to the plunder of provisions and the stealing of livestock that were to follow.
The next step came on the Feast of St. Bernard, August 20. That was the last day the monks were allowed the use of their church, which was then padlocked and sealed. They continued to recite the office in their “scriptorium”—a big place like a schoolroom where the monks read and write and study their theology.
Meanwhile, one or two members of the community who were not bound by vows—novices or oblates—returned to their families. The rest stayed. Of those who went home, one was immediately conscripted into the army of the Popular Front, where he was killed, it is thought, by some of his companions in arms. Another died in a forced-labor battalion.
At the monastery there were two or three weeks of relative calm. On September 8, the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, the monks were taking the usual siesta which the Rule provides for during the summer months, when there was a disturbance at the gatehouse. Representatives of the F.A.I, had put in an appearance, and this time they had a government order to close down the monastery and arrest the monks. The Trappists were given two hours to get their things together and clear out. The little packages they gathered up were searched. Breviaries, rosaries, and anything else connected with the worship of God—including the spiritual notes and other private papers of the monks—were all destroyed.
The abbot, Dom Emmanuel Fleché, was respected—not so much because of his rank or his age or his health but because the French consul had expressed official interest in his safety. He was sent to the nearby village of Cóbreces. Two priests, secretaries of the monastery, were also held at Cóbreces by the Reds, who felt sure they might be able to extract some useful information from them. But the body of the community—they made two big busloads—went off down the road between the vineyards full of ripe fruit and vanished in the direction of Santander.
The doors swung shut on a deserted monastery, and the dust settled again in the road and everything was very, very silent.
The two secretaries, Father Eugenio and Father Vicente, seemed to be in the best position of them all. They were not imprisoned, and when they discovered that things were much safer at Bilbao, they began to make arrangements for going there. Before September ended, they had disappeared. But they had not reached Bilbao. Their bodies were found full of bullets on the road between Torrelavega and Santander, at a place called the Cuesta de las Anguilas. The villagers of Rumoroso recognized them as monks of Viaceli and gave them a Christian burial.
Dom Emmanuel Fleche, protected by the fact that he was a foreigner, was taken to a coastal fishing village which had been marked off as an international zone. It was full of refugees, who lived in the barracks of a big summer camp that served in peacetime as a resort for students from Madrid. The place was given a wide berth by the Fascist bombers, and Dom Emmanuel was relatively safe. Someone smuggled Hosts to him from Santander, and he said Mass, using his Cistercian cowl for a vestment and offering the Blood of Christ in a silver-plated cup that had been awarded to some champion football team of the locality. Someone had also brought him a paten that had been picked out of the ruins of a burned church. On December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, he received notice that he was to sail for France the following day, which he did. He returned to Viaceli when the war was over and finally died there.
As his ship put out to sea, the lonely old abbot of Viaceli may have guessed that these waters had already received into them the bodies of more than ten of his murdered sons.
The two busloads of Trappists who arrived in Santander on September 8 were imprisoned in the college of the Salesian Fathers. After a relatively short time a friend of theirs, not without considerable risk, engineered their release, and they were paroled. They came out into the town, separated into several groups, and lived together wherever they found hospitality in Catholic homes. Many of them escaped to Bilbao.
Father Pio Heredia, the prior, refused his chance to escape and remained in Santander with the largest group of monks, to do what he could to take care of the dispersed community.
In this sixty-one-year-old Cistercian, who was at once profoundly contemplative and capable of energetic and wise command, the monks found the support and the example of sanctity. Father Pio belonged to that generation of Cistercians whom Divine Providence seems to have brought to the cloisters of the White Monks to carry through the work of transformation and unification that immediately followed the reunion of 1892. He had entered the Order at Val San José in 1890. In his forty-six years of cloistered life, steeped in the atmosphere of Benedictine prayer, humility, constant absorption in the presence of God, he had been filled with the spirit and the strength and the peace of the old monastic patriarchs. Although his profound love of the Rule necessarily gave his spirituality the austere and penitential character inseparable from St. Benedict and from Cîteaux, still there was more than mere negation in the soul of Father Pio Heredia. The one element of his spirituality that dominated all the rest and absorbed everything else to itself was love, the love of God: it was a love that transcended all sentiment and emotionality, to attach itself to God’s all-wise Providence and His all-loving will. It was a love that pierced the darkness of every tribulation, every contradiction, and recognized the wise action of a God of love behind the superficial evil of secondary causes. It was a love strong enough to win the great grace of martyrdom.
Most of the men who went to their death with him had been formed to the religious life by Father Pio Heredia when he was novice master at Viaceli. The last days they spent with him were the crown and consummation of their monastic lives.
Although Father Pio and his monks were living across the street from the headquarters of the Red secret police, they lived a life that was entirely monastic and contemplative, beginning each morning with Matins and Lauds at five, followed by Mass—which was said at a dining-room table. There was reading, meditation, manual labor. The whole day revolved around Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, just as it had done at Viaceli, except that the Holy Eucharist was hidden in a dining-room cupboard and not in the Tabernacle of a high altar. They even received Mass stipends from the superioress of some Visitandine nuns who had not yet been dispersed.
The two months spent by the Cistercians at 27 Calle del Sol, Santander, were a final retreat, a preparation for the act that was to be the crown of their monastic vocations. Although they had hoped, for a time, that they would be able to return to their monastery—and even, as Dom Emmanuel expressed it in a letter, to “sing Matins there on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception”—they were surely not surprised that Providence, whose mysterious ways Father Pio had taught them all to contemplate and to adore, had arranged otherwise.
On December 1, in the middle of the morning, they were surprised by the sudden visit of a stranger who claimed that he was an electrician and who insisted on being admitted to the apartment, even when he was assured that there was nothing wrong with the lights. They were ready, then, for the worst.
During the day a young monk who was living alone in another part of town, Frater Alvaro, a cleric, came to visit them. That was how he happened to be with them at the time of the arrest. It was late afternoon when the police came to take them to the comisaría.
At the headquarters of the anarchist G.P.U. they found that several lay brothers, living in a separate group, had been arrested earlier. Handcuffed, they were sitting in silence, waiting for the “trial.”
Commissioner Neila, who was to be their judge, was a bankrupt draper. He had turned Communist and was no exception to the brutality and stupidity of his type: the insignificant functionary who has suddenly acquired the power of life and death over other men. He spent his nights presiding over the baneful tribunal that disposed, according to his fancy, of everyone that came up before him. The only thing he had to worry about was to keep his balance on the Party line and conform to the exact shade of orthodoxy that was dictated for that precise moment.
With monks, of course, there were no complications. Everybody knew that monks were all Fascists and that their monasteries were full of money and machine guns. The main idea was to beat them until they told you where they had hidden their money, and then shoot them.
Like all Spaniards, Neila liked to start his evening’s fun quite late. He did not get around to the monks until one o’clock in the morning. The first one to appear was Father Pio, the prior, and the interest of the commissioner of public order was sharpened to the keenest pitch when he found that a letter containing two hundred pesetas, addressed to Father Pio, had been found in the search.
The prior was questioned. That means, he took a beating. He could not talk without giving away the identity of the Visitandine superioress who had been sending Mass stipends. Therefore he said nothing. His face was swollen and full of blood when he came back to the rest of them in their cell.
One by one the monks and brothers were called into the presence of the commissioner. Since they obviously knew nothing about the money, they did not get so much of a beating, and one of them was even released. Apparently they were not quite sure whether or not he was a Trappist, anyway.
This was Frater Marcelino, a twenty-three-year-old novice with a talent for painting and poetry. He had made an earlier entry into the novitiate at Viaceli but had left in 1931, a short time after receiving the habit. Now he had returned, in 1936, just in time for the Red persecution. This time, although he was only a novice and was therefore free to go wherever and whenever he liked, he stayed with the community in prison and in secular life at Santander. Now that he was formally released, he took his departure. But he was not destined to be separated from his brothers for long. He was finally betrayed, recaptured, and shot. And so, he finally made his stability with the monks of Viaceli who were already in heaven before him. . . .
Indeed, when we look at the men who were gathered that night in the Red comisaria at Santander, we can find plenty of material for meditation on that Providence of which Father Pio had loved to speak to his novices.
Frater Alvaro, whom we have already mentioned, had been an oblate in the monks’ school, closed by the government in 1931. Instead of wandering off into the world and losing touch with Viaceli, he had returned in a year or so to take the novice’s habit. Then, after being separated from the rest in Santander, he happened along on the very afternoon of the arrest.
Another prisoner was Frater Antonio. He had been dismissed from a seminary because he did not have enough brains to be a priest. He could not make anything of his books. The Cistercians at Viaceli had not been able to receive him to profession, either. They kept him as an oblate. He could have gone home when the Reds threatened the monastery. He did not. Providence was reserving for him a higher place in heaven than would go to many a brilliant theologian.
Among the lay brothers was Brother Eustaquio. He was forty-five. Years before, when he was very young, he had entered another monastery of the Order, San Isidro, and had even made simple profession there. Before the time came for solemn vows, he had changed his mind and returned to the world. In 1929 he came back to the cloister, this time at Viaceli. He had made his vows. He was an exemplary brother.
Then there was Brother Angel, the oldest, who was sixty-eight. He had lived in the world as a married man. His wife died, and he entered Viaceli in 1931. After his simple profession he was sent to the foundation of Santa Maria de Huerta. Huerta was in Nationalist territory during the war. But just before the trouble started, Brother Angel became ill and was sent back to Viaceli. There, his vows expired. He renewed them. Just before the Reds came, the old brother, knowing what was ahead, made his solemn profession.
If we knew the stories of them all, we would find many strange things to think about. There were two men of superior learning among them: Father Amedeo and Father Juan Bautista. Together they had edited a little Spanish magazine, for monks and friends, about the life and affairs of the Order. It was called La Voz del Cister. Others of the group were only boys. Brother Ezequiel was nineteen, Brother Eulogio twenty.
They all appeared before Neila, who cursed them and threatened them and had them pushed around. He could not get anything much out of them. In the end he sent them all back and called in Father Pio Heredia.
“You!” roared Neila when the prior returned. “Either you tell us where you have hidden the money or you can pick your own brand of martyrdom.”
Father Pio said: “Do as you please.”
So he was again beaten, and the death sentence was passed on the twelve innocent men.
No one knows what happened to their bodies. In two groups—on December 3 and December 4—they were taken out somewhere, shot—no doubt—and thrown into the sea.
Only a young lay-brother oblate was allowed to go free. Thanks to his release, the story of the others was made known to the Cistercians who had escaped to the more Catholic atmosphere of Bilbao, in the Basque country.
When this diabolical little war ceased tearing Spain to pieces, Dom Emmanuel returned. The monks who still survived gathered around him once again, happy to find that there was still something left of their monastery. Empty storerooms and a few desecrated statues in the sanctuary were all that bore witness to the short-lived Red rule of the province.
In the powerful Catholic revival that followed the carnage of the Spanish Civil War, the Cistercian monasteries of the Peninsula have all grown. One of them, San Isidro, made a new foundation in 1942, in the darkest days of the European conflict. It is called Nuestra Señora de los Mártires (Our Lady of the Martyrs).
But no sooner was the pressure upon the Church in Spain relieved than it was applied with equal force at another point. The Nazi occupation of Austria led to the suppression of the Trappist monastery of Engelszell on the banks of the Danube. The Gestapo arrived on July 27, 1939, and immediately took the abbot and prior off to prison. The subprior and several monks soon followed, and the monastery was completely suppressed on November 2. The property was confiscated, and several members of the community were condemned to internment at Dachau—a camp whose very name has become synonymous with an earthly hell. Naturally, they did not survive.
It was only in 1946 that a combined death notice for all the deceased of Engelszell finally reached our American monasteries: the interminable list of these innocent men, condemned as enemies of Reich und Volk, was read out in our chapter rooms.
They joined their Spanish brethren in the light of glory, victims of the same hatred of God and His Church, although they happened to have been killed by the Nazis instead of by the Reds. It is a strange irony that the Nazis, who had fought the Communists in Spain, were at that moment entering an alliance with Soviet Russia which led to the martyrdom of a whole Catholic nation: as if any further proof were needed as to the futility of political motives, which cannot obscure the real issue in all these chaotic upheavals of our time.
September, 1939, saw the long-dreaded opening of hostilities. The general mobilization in France and Belgium once more drained monasteries and seminaries of men. The archabbey of the Order saw forty religious leave for the front. Bellefontaine lost nineteen out of forty-nine and Sept-Fons sent thirty men to the army. Many monks followed the footsteps of Máxime Carlier and left Chimay for the armed forces: this time there were twenty-five. All down the list of our houses it was the same. Yet, there were surprisingly few casualties. All of Cîteaux’s forty came home again. None of the thirty men from Sept-Fons was lost. And Bellefontaine’s contingent not only came home intact, but two of them had the Croix de guerre. One of these was the abbot, Dom Gabriel Sortais; he was wounded at Lille, where he went into action with the Twenty-Fifth French Infantry Motorized Division. He was taken prisoner by the Nazis, and starved for a winter in a prison camp in Prussia. In 1941 he returned to his monastery to spend the rest of the war in the quiet routine of Cistercian life.
Ste. Marie du Mont, which had been gutted by a bombardment in the first war, contributed forty men to the various armies. The monastery was again bombarded, and twenty-four of her men went to German prison camps. All eventually returned except one lay brother killed at Hazebrouck. The year 1943 found the monastery repaired and most of the community living a normal life within its walls; and soon postulants began to arrive in considerable numbers, and when the war ended, the house was bigger than it had been in 1939. . . .
When the German armies flooded France in 1940, many Cistercian communities fled before them, and the houses in the south of France began to bulge with refugees. But a relative calm was soon restored, and communities sorted themselves out, ending up more or less in their proper places. Then followed the long, lean, dreary years of the Nazi occupation. Outwardly, everything went on smoothly, but they were years of strain, interrupted by sudden flurries of violence. Few indeed were the monasteries whose peace was not shattered at least once by the incursions of the Gestapo. These guests invariably turned the house upside down looking for concealed weapons and “maquisards,” and sometimes they were all too close to finding certain persons they were very interested in apprehending. M. Schumann, who later became French Prime Minister, found refuge at Notre Dame des Neiges, in the mountains of Southern France, where he took the oblate’s habit and followed the whole routine of the monastery. If the Gestapo had penetrated the enclosure of the abbey of Bellefontaine in a certain week of August, 1944, they would have run into a storm of machine-gun bullets, for a detachment of Allied parachutists had landed and were hiding there. As it was, one or two Cistercian monks who had returned from the army had not ceased waging a secret campaign against the Nazis.
Father Guenael, a patriotic Breton, cellarer of the monastery of Thymadeuc, in the Morbihan, was in constant contact with the Free French leaders abroad and offered all the aid he could to Allied agents and parachutists. When compromising papers and a cache of firearms were discovered, Father Guenael was arrested by the Gestapo and disappeared from Brittany forever. News finally arrived that he was in the concentration camp of Neuengamme, where he died.
On December 8, 1943, as the pontifical High Mass for the feast of the Immaculate Conception was ending, officers of the Gestapo presented themselves at the abbey of Our Lady of the Dombes, near Lyons, with a demand for their cellarer, Father Bernard. They had to wait for him to unvest, because he had served in the sanctuary as assistant priest during the Mass. Then they led him off immediately to Lyons.
The monk had been denounced because of his contacts with resistance elements, and his captors did not neglect to put him through their most expert treatment in their attempts to get something out of him. Failing in this, they sent him, already half dead, to Compiegne, whence he passed successively to concentration camps at Weimar, Nordhausen, and Belsen-Bergen—where he finally succumbed. Although he died for his country rather than for his faith, nevertheless the courage and supernatural patience and charity with which he suffered all these things made a tremendous impression on his fellow prisoners. When the news of his death was heard, all the villages and small towns in the neighborhood of his monastery held memorial services, which were packed not only with Catholics but with men of every shade of belief or no belief at all. Meanwhile, the abbey of the Dombes had acquired a very unsavory reputation with the Gestapo, and in 1944 about a hundred Nazi military police and other soldiers broke into the house and put on one of their typical displays of violence. Having first beaten up some of the monks, they lined the entire community up against a wall and kept them there for three hours with their hands up, facing a battery of machine guns. Meanwhile, the abbot was subjected to questioning. He could not understand one tenth of the words that were screamed into his face through a welter of half-French, half-German abuse and profanity. The search of the house having yielded no results, the SS suddenly left, taking with them a few prisoners who eventually came home safely.
Other houses in France, while not subjected to deliberate maltreatment, at least suffered intense inconvenience from the Germans. One day, for instance, the monks of Bricquebec, in Normandy, came out of choir after Prime to discover that their front courtyard was occupied by thirty-nine German army trucks filled with soldiers, who were busy shaving to the tune of radios turned on full blast. They had no intention of bothering the monks: all they wanted was the monastery. The father abbot, in his turn, had stated his position quite definitely: “We won’t leave, even if we have to sleep under the apple trees.” They did not get that far. The Nazis left them a cellar and their church. To get from the cellar to the church, they had to go around the outside of the buildings and enter their choir through a hole in the wall, as the cloister was occupied by their guests. On rainy days the offices met with considerable competition from the soldiers drilling in the cloister, the roaring of the Nazi sergeants and the crash of rifle butts on the stone floor where monks were accustomed to pace up and down in silent meditation! When the sun came out the visitors disposed themselves comfortably on the roofs of the cloister or in the grass of the cemetery and exposed their pink Nordic nakedness to the warm rays.
But in a few weeks, when the Allied drive began, Bricquebec was turned into a hospital. The refectory became an operating room, where three surgeons were busy day and night. Doubtless it was the red crosses on the roofs that saved the monastery from being wiped out altogether. It lay directly in the path of the advance from Cherbourg and was in the midst of the fighting in Normandy.
Chimay, too, was turned out of doors by the Germans. This time the Luftwaffe wanted the abbey as a base and listening post. Dom Anselme le Bail and his community packed up their belongings and moved in with the Christian Brothers in a nearby town. There they remained for two years, until the American troops arrived and liberated the region. All that time, the Rule was kept faithfully, all the choral offices went on as usual, and the life of a Cistercian monastery was uninterrupted in its essentials. In fact, Dom Anselme was working diligently on the Cistercian writers of the twelfth century to produce a manual of spiritual theology for his young monks. An indult from the Holy See even allowed them to receive novices. They were bothered by the Gestapo, who arrested some of the monks but afterward let them go.
Some of the houses in Belgium and Holland were under more of a strain. The activities of the Gestapo in those parts were under the direction of an apostate priest, a former member of a religious order. With the peculiar psychology such people sometimes have, he concentrated his attention on the religious orders—no doubt to try and satisfy some obscure and torturing sense of inferiority—in other words, to make priests and religious pay for the suffering his own stifled conscience was still causing him. . . .
He saw to it that the Trappists of two monasteries, Echt and Achel, were expelled. The former house, near Limburg, was turned into a school for the Hitler Youth and remained so until 1945, when the Allies arrived. When the monks returned, they found nothing but a gutted building. The Nazis had not even left them a wooden spoon.
Meanwhile, the apostate turned his steps to the big Dutch abbey of Koeningshoeven, at Tilburg. However, he was in a good mood that day and somehow took a fancy to the Cistercians. Finding nothing to object to, he covered his departure with some heavy clowning, saluted the first superior with “Ave, abbas illustrissime” and asked the brother at the gate to pray for him, because he was a poor sinner.
Before that, however, Koeningshoeven had had a more bitter taste of Nazi methods. In August, 1942, toward three o’clock in the morning, when the monks were singing the night office, the Gestapo arrived and demanded two fathers and a lay brother who were converted Jews. All three were blood brothers: Fathers Ignatius and Nivard and Brother Linus Loeb. Their two sisters, Mothers Hedwig and Theresa Loeb, were Cistercian nuns in the convent of Berkel. They, too, were arrested, along with another Jewish convert, an extern sister who had been a doctor of medicine in the world. Nothing was heard of them for a long time, until at last word was received, in a roundabout way, that the three Trappists had been shot in Poland on the Feast of Pentecost, 1943. The others vanished without a trace.
It was when the Allies landed on the Continent and began to drive the Nazis back into Germany that the real martyrdom of some of our monasteries began. Perhaps no house in the Order suffered so much as Tegelen, near Venlo, Holland, not far from the Meuse. Half the house was occupied by German soldiers from the first days of the Nazi invasion. There was an airfield nearby, as well as other military objectives. Month after month, year after year, the monks were in constant dread of raids by the R.A.F., and they spent many nights in the crypt of the church, trying to recite Matins while bombs thundered all around them.
In Holy Week, 1943, the monastery caught fire and three wings burned down, together with some of the barns. Nevertheless, the monks stayed on in what remained, along with refugees from Achel and Echt. It was community life with a vengeance! Things got worse with the frequent bombardments of Venlo in 1944. Upward of three hundred civilian refugees found shelter in the monastery. The meager provisions of the monks, shared out among this crowd, were just enough to keep them all alive. In November the Allied forces drew near and then were held in check at the Meuse—just close enough for the monastery to be in the path of a ceaseless artillery fire aimed over their roofs at the Germans behind them. The British gunners unloaded tons of ammunition on the Nazis, sometimes at the rate of sixty thousand shells a day. The monks and refugees, reduced to a state of famine, were living underground. The monastery was struck by shells in several places. One day, just after dinner, a pursuit bomber swooped down and riddled the empty refectory with bullets. The monks were taking what was euphemistically called a “siesta” at that particular moment.
When the Americans finally took Venlo, the monks were so far gone that they could not believe that deliverance had finally arrived. It was a few days before all the guns were silent, and only then did the truth begin to sink in.
Tegelen had had five full years of war. Yet, Our Lady of Refuge, at Zundert, Holland, had five quiet years in which the life of prayer was not interrupted for a minute. One monk was called to the army—an Austrian priest who returned safely to his cloister, “more of a Trappist than ever.” For the rest, the only excitement was caused by a bomb falling on one of the barns. The monks scarcely saw a German uniform all that time, and they did not contribute a single member to the forced-labor gangs which were so busily conscripted from Belgium and Holland and France in those days.
The monasteries in Alsace got the war in two doses; it blundered through their territory, then came back again. The nuns of Ubexy had some narrow escapes in the first round and were forced underground when the fighting returned their way in 1944. Many refugees crowded to the convent. There were some bad scares but nobody was hurt.
The big abbey of Oelenberg, which had been destroyed in World War I and rebuilt afterward, was once again destroyed at the end of World War II. The French troops had pressed as far as the neighborhood of the abbey in November, 1944, when the Nazis established an observation post in the church tower. For about a month, beginning in December, the French had to subject the post to artillery fire. The barns and harvest were destroyed and the church was riddled with shells; all the farm machinery was destroyed, and the Germans, before leaving, killed all the livestock and left the monks with a farm full of mines on which to try and raise themselves something to eat. . . .
Nevertheless, 1944 was a glad year for the Cistercians of the Strict Observance in all parts of Europe. They can remember the happy day when the first American or British divisions began to move past their fields. Most of the communities in the actual area of fighting played host to Allied soldiers during the last stage of the war, with the result that many American laymen know the Trappist monasteries of Europe better than do the American Cistercians themselves.