Arlington, Va., Nov 29, 2019 / 03:00 am (CNA).- Years before Pope Francis’ ecological encyclical Laudato Si’ was published, a Trappist monastery in Virginia went back to its spiritual roots by embracing environmental stewardship.
“This really is a re-founding,” Fr. James Orthmann of Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va. told CNA, a “real renewal and a re-founding, and in a real sense getting back to our traditional roots.”
Since 2007, the community has taken concrete steps to be better stewards of the earth in the tradition of the Cistercian Order, while also reaching into the outside world to draw more Catholic men to their monastic life.
The abbey was founded in 1950 after a planned Trappist abbey in Massachusetts burned down. The Diocese of Richmond offered to accept the monks and they procured 1200 acres of pasture on the Shenandoah River in Northwest Virginia, just in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east.
However by the early 2000s, the community had shrunk along with the overall number of religious priests and brothers in the U.S., which has fallen by more than 50 percent since 1965. The community’s Father Immediate – the abbot of their mother house – suggested in 2007 they start planning how to sustain the abbey for the long-term.
The monks discussed their most important resources and “literally everybody talked about our location, our land,” Fr. James recalled. “As monks who follow the Rule of St. Benedict, we have a vow of stability. So we bind ourselves to the community and to the place that we enter.”
The Trappists have a long history of settling in valleys and caring for the land, dating back to their roots in the Cistercian Order and their mother abbey in Citeaux, France, founded in 1098. Monks at Holy Cross Abbey began farming the land in 1950 but as the community grew older, they leased out the land to local farmers and made creamed honey and fruitcake for their labor.
“We live a way of life that’s literally rooted in the land,” Fr. James explained. “The liturgical life reflects the succession of the seasons, and the more you become sensitized to that, the symbolism of the liturgy becomes so much more compelling.”
So what specifically have the monks done to become better environmental stewards? First, they reached out to the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment to author a study on how the abbey could be more environmentally sustainable in the Cistercian tradition.
A group of graduate students made the project their master’s thesis. The result was a 400-page study, “Reinhabiting Place,” with all sorts of recommendations for the monks. With these suggestions as a starting place, the monks took action.
First, they turned to the river. They asked the cattle farmer to whom they lease 600 acres of their land to stop his cattle from grazing in the river. This would protect the riverbanks from eroding and keep the cows from polluting the water, which flows into the Potomac River, past Washington, D.C., and eventually feeds the massive Chesapeake Bay.
They fenced off tributaries of the river and planted native hardwoods and bushes on the banks as shelter for migratory animals and to attract insects and pollinators to “restore the proper biodiversity to the area,” Fr. James explained. They also leased 180 acres of land to a farmer for natural vegetable farming.
Most of the abbey’s property was put into “conservation easement” with the county and the state. By doing this, the monks promise that the land will forever remain “fallow,” or agricultural and undeveloped, and they receive a tax benefit in return. The county provides this policy to check suburban sprawl and retain a rural and agricultural nature.
The community also switched their heating and fueling sources from fossil fuels to propane gas. They had a solar-fed lighting system installed in two of the guest retreat dorms, and they pay for the recycling of their disposable waste. The monks stopped making fruitcake for a year to install a new more energy-efficient oven and make building repairs.
The have even started offering “green burials” at Cool Spring Cemetery in the Trappist style.
Normal burials can cost well over $7,000 with embalming fluids and lead coffins that can be detrimental to the soil. A Trappist burial, by contrast, is “rather sparse” and “rather unadorned,” Fr. James explained. A monk is wrapped in a shroud and placed directly on a wooden bier in the ground.
The Trappist burials, while quite different from a typical modern burial, actually have an earthy character to them that’s attractive, Fr. James maintained.
After the “initial shock” at seeing such a sparse burial for the first time, “oddly enough, it’s very cathartic and you have a real sense of hope,” he said. The burials are “a lot less formal” and “people [in attendance] are more spontaneous,” he noted, and there’s “even a certain joyfulness to it.”
With their “green burials,” the body is wrapped in a shroud or placed in a biodegradable container like a wooden coffin, and buried in the first four feet of the soil. By one year, just the skeleton may be left, but it’s a harkening back to the Ash Wednesday admonition, “Remember man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”
And this contrasts with the complicated embalming process of normal funerals where chemicals like formaldehyde can seep into the ground.
The monks have already touched lives with their example of stewardship.
Local residents George Patterson and Deidra Dain produced a film “Saving Place, Saving Grace” about the monastery’s efforts to remain sustainable, for a local PBS affiliate station. The affiliate’s general manager had looked at the story and thought everyone needed to hear it.
The monastery has been an “example” to the county’s leadership with its care for the land, Patterson said. Dain, a retreatant at the monastery some 15 years ago, is not Catholic but found her time at the abbey “inspiring” and as a lover of nature praises their sustainability initiative.
All in all, the communal effort for stewardship is “helping to renew our life,” Fr. James said of the community.
Papal statements on the environment have given a boost to their efforts. “There was a lot of supportive stuff from the time of Pope Benedict about the environment,” Fr. James recalled, particularly in his 2008 encyclical Caritas in Veritate which upheld the responsibility of man to care for the environment.
This “helped bridge” any gulfs that kept certain members of the community from fully embracing the sustainability initiative, Fr. James said.
Parts of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment Laudato Si’ are “so sophisticated in (their) grasp of environmental teaching,” he continued, and it’s quite a support to have popes promoting environmental stewardship amidst the bureaucratic tediousness of upgrading the abbey’s land and facilities.
“At the end of the day, I can open up Laudato Si’ and say to myself ‘Ah, this is worth it. We should keep doing this. I’m going to keep putting up with the nonsense to get this done’,” he said.
The community hopes too that it can be a sustainability model for developing countries that might not be able to afford high-tech and expensive solutions to environmental problems. Their facilities are simple by nature and not sophisticated, and the monks’ consumption is already low because they take a vow of poverty.
Plus, retreatants at the monastery can observe first-hand the changes made and consider what they can do in their own lives to be more caring for the environment.
However, in its “re-founding” efforts, the community has also explored ways to attract more vocations to the abbey.
“In the last 10 years, we’ve lost most of our seniors first to illness, aging, and then death. So in a sense, the community has a whole new profile right now,” Fr. James said. The abbey was founded to be “separate” from the cosmopolitan world, but young men are not actively seeking out the monastic life like they did in the 1950s and ’60s.
So the community created a new website and continuously update it with new posts. They started hosting “immersion weekends” where men come and live with the monks for a weekend, praying with them. They expanded their local profile in the community by hosting teenagers to earn their school community service hours. “Only two students had realized we existed here,” Fr. James recalled in a telling moment.
“We’re reaching out to men of all ages, and it’s probably even more likely, given the limits of our way of life, that nowadays it’s going to be older men who are coming to this vocation,” Fr. James admitted. “This way of life and its limits make much more sense to people who have tried their quote-unquote dream, have been disillusioned by the result, and they’re yearning for something more.”
What distinguishes Holy Cross Abbey and the Trappist way of life? Their vocation to community life, Fr. James answered, “the silence, the discipline of silence, and daily familiarity with the Scriptures.”
The monks follow an intense daily schedule of prayer, contemplation, and work that includes 3:30 a.m. prayer and a “Great Silence.” They don’t leave the abbey grounds and don’t own private property.
“It’s a lifestyle that very much will develop one’s interiority, spirituality, relationship with God,” he said. “It’s a vocation of adoration, done in community, and offered to the world around us through hospitality here in this place.”
And the modern world offers special challenges to a man discerning this vocation, he admitted.
“There’s not much in the pop culture to invite a person to even think about interiority. And in fact it can be rather threatening to people,” he said. “Initially,” when one begins to seriously cultivate an interior life, “it’s the negative stuff that comes up.”
However, “with guidance you realize that’s the negative face of very important, unrecognized resources. And our vulnerability is perhaps the greatest resource we have in life. (Even if) that’s not the message you’d get from watching Oprah.”
This article was originally published on CNA Sept. 2, 2015.
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And so here we are.
Our devoutly Democratic Catholic president has effectively made it illegal to affirm the Catholic faith.
And half of Catholics will, no doubt, respond by continuing to vote for Democrats.
I mean, come on. With Catholics like this, who needs atheists.
Only half?
The irony is that one of the more noted atheists, Richard Dawkins, recently said he was a cultural Christian and wanted to live in a place dominated by Christianity (as opposed to Islam).
The other half Republican? Do the hypothetical votes cancel each other out and amount to nothing in the end? If we were all to stay out of politics and expend out time and energy on spreading the light in this dark world, perhaps it would be a better place. Won’t happen though! 😂
Your placement of the word “devoutly” before “Democratic” says it all!
I think that too many Democratic Catholics, especially older Catholics, are still voting for Pres. John F. Kennedy, who was a fairly good man and a fairly good President. But there are also too many Democratic Catholics who honestly and naively believe that the Democratic Party helps “the little men”–the poor, the working people, the minorities, the immigrants, and the women and children, while the Republicans are all rich fat cats who use “the little men” to enrich their own pockets. How sad, and I hope that local Catholic parishes will be unafraid to provide educational opportunities for people, especially younger people who might be more open to learning truth, to learn about political REALITY in our country at this time in history! People don’t read books much nowadays, so I hope that Trent Horn’s book will have a strong online presence so that it will actually get read.
The first time I became consciously aware of the words Democrat and Republican was during the Kennedy-Nixon race in 1960. (I was seven at the time.) Born and raised in a blue-collar city in eastern Massachusetts, I assumed that the whole world was made up of Democrats. One evening I said to my father, “We’re Democrats, right?” — “That’s right,” he answered. — “Well, who are the Republicans?” I demanded to know. Without hesitation, he said, “Rich people.” I realized the irony only years later. Between Nixon and Kennedy, who grew up with wealth, limousines, summers abroad, fancy boarding schools? Who, in short, was one of the “rich people”? Hint: It wasn’t Nixon.
JFK was a pervert and a serial womanizer. The press covered for him. He was not a good man.
Things change Mrs.Sharon. Back in the day everyone where we live were Democrats. Rich or poor alike. Now many working class people vote GOP.It keeps evolving.
Who are the most dangerous people presently who can over turn this nonsense? They’re ARCHEOLOGISTS! Since by looking at skeletal remains can easily state who was a woman and who was a man!!! Biden is a pathetic wreck of a catholic whose continual showing of “St” beau’s rosary beads has become a rite, that we could all do without!
I’ve thought pretty much the same thing. Despite contemporary rhetoric to the contrary, gender is not assigned at birth; sex is recognized at birth, after having been indelibly established in the womb. If one is male (or female) in the womb, one will be male (or female) until the moment of death, and if archaeologists dig up that person’s bones in the future, they will still be recognized as having been those of a male (or female).
Also, how many “biological female” athletes are bucking to compete in men’s games? I wonder why not. 🤔
There are a few women who have been admitted to men’s football teams as place kickers or holders. And both women and men skate together on synchronized skating teams (12 skaters on the ice performing a program that includes many of the figure skating elements such as lifts, spins, and jumps, along with team elements such as wheels, intersections, lines, circles, blocks. And Kaitlin Clark recently broke the record for baskets (basketball) long held by Pete Marovich. As a woman, I think most women have too much common sense to try to compete with men in professional sports. And now that workplace sports teams (baseball, volleyball, broomball, etc.) appear to be part of the Baby Boomer generation, I don’t know that we’ll see women competing with men very often.
Archeologists are now being cautioned not to identify human remains as male or female despite skeletal and DNA evidence–because they don’t know how the dead “identified.”
Won’t this new executive order also outlaw same-sex schools at any level?
I predict that in three to five years “dudes” will be winning nearly all women’s events, and that should put an end to this nonsense. It is unfortunate that until that happens a lot of dedicated women athletes will be missing out.
It’s schizophrenic. The reader likely knew immediately what that refers to. That someone can live in two different worlds, as does Biden, worlds opposed to each other, seemingly unaware, convinced there’s no contradiction. But the fact is it’s, I believe, more of a moral disease than clinical that afflicts many, particularly clergy. However, clergy disguise their immoral disease, and are aware of the malice, Biden flaunts it.
What President Biden’s immoral conceptualization of Christianity really says is that he believes what is evil is good, and that good is evil. How so? Well, isn’t that the moral theology that teaches there are evil behaviors, although there are also circumstances in our concrete reality that diminish the evil? A mitigation that corresponds between degree of difficulty and conscience, although contrary to this form of ethics, is the availability of grace, the gift won for us by Christ on the battlefield of the cross.
However, Title IX gender identity discrimination is an entirely new species of moral degenerative disease. Different from mitigation and undue burden. No need for grace here because what the Biden Administration now affirms, is the justice protected freedom to profess whatever gender description for themselves people wish regardless of their biological identity. This is an entirely new freedom based morality that overrules any personal conviction or religious belief. Joe Biden had said previously that he disbelieves what the Catholic Church officially teaches on this and other vital issues. And of course most know the rapport between the Vatican, a number of hierarchy, and Biden, strongly suggests that this is what the Church holds to be true. Should there be wonder why so many are leaving, when the Easter Vigil Mass this year had 17 attendees at a local parish when just a short couple of years past it was in the hundreds?
Local parish where?
My parish baptized/confirmed more than 17 people at Easter Vigil. The overall statistics seem to indicate a significant increase in people entering the Church.
I rather suspect it depends mainly on whether the parish in question believes what the Church has traditionally taught, or at least is struggling in that direction and against the prevailing current. There’s no point in going to Church if the prevailing culture is correct, so the person must be somewhat counter-cultural to even bother showing up, and the parish must be counter-cultural to attract those people.
Where? Anywhere small town USA. Why does a parish in the same vicinity flourish? Is it the priest who lives a devout life, a single parishioner offering his prayers and suffering? Perhaps the parish with a Legion of Mary that visits medical centers, nursing homes, jails, the shutins, the sick has that spark of faith. That the sun shines here and not over the hill is beyond our control. Not so where grace flows down.
“That someone can live in two different worlds, as does Biden, worlds opposed to each other, seemingly unaware, convinced there’s no contradiction.”
Ah, it is so easy! “I am a Catholic and Jesus said we should love our neighbor and so, out of my love for him I call him “she” and grant him access to all females-only places”. Being challenged “but this is not a woman” such a Catholic will answer “mercy is above justice” and so it goes. Being challenged “But the women do not want a man in the female changing room, they are afraid” the answer is “how intolerant of them – they have nothing to be afraid of, they must work on themselves”. Etc.
It is all about the heresy of being “nice”. Such politicians are “nice” to biological men. Is it an authentic empathy with transsexuals? – Absolutely not, it is all about “nice” self-image. Why am I so sure? – Because a person cannot have selective empathy and compassion. If he feels empathy with biological males who want to get access to the female-only places he must also feel the same empathy with vulnerable women who do not want those males to be there. But he does not. And why is that? – Because:
1) he does not have empathy for anyone, he is deficient
2) because if he refuses to allow males into female toilets he is not “nice” to women, he is just normal – why if he allows, he is very nice.
Here we are, it is all about being nice. Such “Catholics” swapped “good” with “nice” and reinterpret the Scriptures and Tradition accordingly – according to themselves.
I also argue that men who make the laws which endanger women are not really men, psychologically. They are devoid of a normal instinct any normal man has, of protecting women and girls. So those men (and women) who create such laws basically announce “we are neither male nor female but something else” – and here if they are Catholics they may say “Yes! Isn’t the apostle Paul said it?”
Yes. Men have lost their sense of manhood in fear of retribution. Appeasing deviants is ideological favoritism. To be odd or queer once disdained as a cowardly betrayal of one’s manhood is now vaunted as heroic. Liberty, now freedom to revise life itself, now an idol of worship, jealously protected by federal law. Enemies of truth such as George Soros invests millions to corrupt the Justice system with the aim of collapsing our once traditional Common Law culture. Lucifer has done an incredible job of feminizing modern man. Man’s elective weakness is a rebellion against God.
Prof Eduardo J Echeverria notes that Pope Francis, in his autobiography, ‘Life: My Story Through History’ advocates for legal support of same-sex civil unions of homosexuals “who [Francis says] experience the gift of love”. Echeverria asks, “In what sense, if any, is homosexual love a gift?” .
So, is it the story of feminizing men in the West? In my homeland (Russia) we have it because of multiple wars. After the war 1942-45 we had a deficiency of men – of the fathers and those whom women can marry. Even worse, the widowed mothers would often treat their sons as “my precious”. A generation spoiled by single mothers, men rose who seriously expected women to serve them just like their mothers did. They honestly believed that their value is in the fact they are men (what kind of men did not matter).
It is a very broad generalization of course but misogyny created by mothers is definitely a trend. And such misogyny, sucked with mother’s milk is the worst.
By the way, I have observed among younger Roman Catholic priests in the West a disproportionate number of those who clearly show the symptoms of being “a mother’s golden boy”. Like many Russian men, they are brought up by mothers – not that they had physically absent fathers but emotionally absent, disconnected from their wives or suppressed by them.
You make good sense on the issue Anna. Fortunately with will and fortitude a mother’s darling can still make himself a man.
It looks like there are 2 reasonable options: 1. Successfully challenge the law in federal court, and break it until the case(s) is won. 2. Start setting up a parallel education system that does not use federal funding.
Going along to get along is not a reasonable option.
The democrats can make up fantasy rules on any perv thing they want but it will not wash. More and more the little girls themselves are saying no when asked to compete against a boy at a competition. There is no reason for these girls to risk injury or compete on an uneven playing field to satisfy some crazy notion of sexuality which is transparently false. Its clear the kids have more brains than the adults on this issue.
The Government was allowed to create a religion when it established “gender identity” as a protected characteristic that isn’t shared by all people. There can only be protections for immutable traits like race and biological gender/sex, which are shared by everyone, not the unverifiable, unnatural and imagined idea of sex and gender. This makes “Gender Identity” a government sponsored religion which is why it conflicts with Christianity.