The Hard Peace

Life is not easy among the Trappists.

The order known as the Cistercians of the Strict Observance is one of the most austere in the Roman Catholic Church. On ordinary days rising hour is 2 a.m. (it is earlier on Sundays and feast days). Seven hours are devoted to sleep, about seven to the Divine Office and Mass, one hour to meals, four hours to study and private prayers, usually five hours to manual labor. Except when sick, Trappists* eat no meat, fish, eggs; unless they are giving necessary directions for labor, monks without special assignment may not speak, except to their superior.

And yet the five U.S. monasteries of this rigorous order are attracting more & more ex-G.I.s who seek a peace that they cannot seem to find elsewhere in the postwar world. Of 35 new men entering the Trappist monastery at Valley Falls, R.I., 25 are veterans. One of the veterans, according to the Rt. Rev. Dom Mary Edmund Futterer, abbot of the Abbey of Our Lady of the Valley, laid his decision to wartime experience in France. The veteran remembered it like this:

"I was in the front lines. . . . We learned about night patrols and fear, and a lot of us learned about prayer. I think that was when I decided on my vocation to the Cistercian life, lying in a shallow foxhole listening to a boy mumble 'O Lord! O Lord' as the shells screamed overhead and exploded. ... I realized my faith wasn't so strong, neither was my confidence nor my love. So I prayed to Our Lady to spare me, and promised her to join the Cistercians to learn to love. She did. And I did."

So many ex-G.I.s have been joining the Trappists that the Abbey at Valley Falls is overcrowded. The order has bought an 800-acre valley ranch in northern New Mexico, announced the Rt. Rev. Msgr. Clarence Schoeppner, chancellor of the archdiocese of Santa Fe. Two Trappists would take formal possession this week.

It was the second expansion of the Trappists this year. Last July 33 Trappist monks, brothers and novices established the Monastery of the Holy Trinity on a 1,640-acre ranch at the head of the Ogden valley near Ogden, Utah. Outside work is finished on a temporary monastery of Quonset-type buildings. Soon the monks expect to begin work on an irrigation system, and on gardens and orchards.

* So called because they follow the reform inaugurated in the 17th Century by the Abbot de Rance in the Abbey La Trappe, in Normandy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.