A friend of mine is on vacation in Colorado right now, where he writes about his puzzling visit to a monastery with lots of activity but no monks.
Today I went to the winery of Holy Cross Monastery, a Benedictine monastery near Colorado Springs.
It was a very interesting experience. This is what you might call a “happenin'” monastery. As you come in, signs direct you to over a dozen different groups or locations or what-have-you. […]
They had a very nice and elegant wine shop, even classy. (And the wine was superb. Bought 3 bottles.) Unfortunately the monks hired a professional winemaker to make the wine; they are apparently not involved.
The monastery itself was not too classy on the inside; it had that sort of tired, worn look a 50s or 60s monastery might have. It had a bookshop, whose books were 50% off. Turns out they were liquidating them; they had recently moved the shop and had no more room for the books. I perused them, but could not make out the theological orientation. They had several Ignatius books, including one or two on Cdl. Ratzinger. They had Christopher West’s book on love and marriage, which very much suggests “neo-orthodoxy”. They even had a book from Sophia Institute Press! They had a bunch of books by Anthony [de] Mello, but I don’t know where he stands. I could not find any doubtful books, though they did have a lot of books from Paulist Press from authors I did not know. They also had “St. Joseph Homeseller” kits complete with statue.
Oh, elsewhere in the monastery I found a cache of pamphlets, including JP2’s Dives in Misericordia, labeled as “obsolete” (or some similar term) with a condescending note that ‘some may find this of value’, e.g., to see how people thought back in the old days. […]
Anyway, so I couldn’t figure out where they stand theologically too much. Inside the monastery, they also had a museum, or rather two museums, one monastic (where I found the antique booklets), and a larger one about — the Indians. Why they opted to put this in a monastery, I don’t know.
After that, we walked down the length of the monastery’s first floor and visited the chapel, then walked back through, then to the cafeteria in another building, and had lunch.
Not once during this whole visit did I ever see a monk. Even stranger, I asked the waitress, and she said that she only saw one once in a very great while. She didn’t even have an idea of how many monks there were. Strange for what appears to be a very active monastery.
Well, not any more.
I suppose it tells you something when their web site is all about the winery and not at all about the monastery that happens to be attached to it.
It must have been active once upon a time. Three years ago they still had 18 monks, according to their listing in a vocations directory, but the vocations must not have come. In 2002 the Abbey announced plans to give up and close. The headline on that announcement says the Abbey “Plans for the Future” – -but ‘no future’ is more like it.
This is pretty unusual. How does a monastic community run into the ground? I can’t help but think about that note, and the lack of faith it represents: as if the writings of Pope John Paul were of mere antiquarian interest to some minority of Catholics. Is that part of the problem?
If any of our readers know more about the monastery and how it ended up this way, would you tell about it in the comments?
Father de Mello has some issues, huh?
Fr. de Mello’s writings were condemned by the CDF. I got a copy of the decree from the Daughters of St Paul bookstore, declaring that his writings could not be safely read and were not to be sold or purchased by the Catholic faithful.
On the last page of the booklet the decree was in, there was a listing of titles and a Paulist Press-inserted blurb:
For these and other works of Anthony de Mello, contact your nearest Paulist Press distributor.
I laughed for days. Somebody musta felt stupid when they realized what happened.
easy come…easy go.
I don’t know about this Colorado monastery specifically, but there’s one near Elmira NY that uses Communion matter that I think invalidates the sacrament (includes, honey, baking soda, and some other stuff besides wheat flour and water). They are down to 10 or 12 monks, and have had very few new vocations in the last 20 years. I guess that could be a result of decades without a valid Eucharist. Perhaps the one in Colorado had similar issues.
Monks, just like everyone else, need to put food on the table, pay for health care, keep the buildings in repair, etc. I think that this monastery just can’t do it–between the dearth of vocations in the last few years, the aging population of existing monks (getting too old to work and needing more and more medical care), and the lack of income, they probably just couldn’t figure out how to keep the monastery going. I don’t have any information about this particular situation, but I have read somewhere that the average “life-span” of any particular monastery is between 100-200 years; then they tend to disband. Even Monte Cassino, where Benedictinism essentially began, has not been in continuous operation (I believe–I could be wrong about that, but I seem to remember reading that). My assumption is these monks will transfer to other monasteries that are better able to support them; although I don’t know anything at all about the nuts and bolts of closing a monastery I do know that this is not a truly unusual occurence.