Hello from Ireland where I have been on a personal and ancestral pilgrimage. An image captures a mercurial grace I’ve been trying to articulate. It is of Mount Melleray Abbey outside Cappoquin, County Waterford very near my ancestral roots. On Thursday when I participated in Sext (noonday prayer) there were five monks in choir stalls. Two were clearly pushing 90! None of the others are what we would call young.

I’ve always loved the Cistercian/Trappist tradition and have visited New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque, Iowa as often as I’ve been able. As the name suggests, New Melleray is an offshoot of Mount Melleray — seven or eight monks were missioned from Ireland in the mid-1840s to establish an abbey in response to an invitation by the bishop of Dubuque.

You will recall that Henry VIII abolished all monasteries and confiscated their lands. Irish monks fled to France. After a few centuries, and with Catholicism again being tolerated in Ireland (1829), a group of Trappists returned home to establish Mount Melleray in 1832. The photo only shows a portion of a sprawling abbey campus. A train of serpentine buildings probably add an equally sized footprint to the complex. The campus is huge and immaculately maintained.

Fr Donal, OCSO with whom I spoke said they now lease out their farmland, have a cafe which is open to the public, a gift shop and heritage center. These are their sources of income. He noted that New Melleray in Iowa had recently helped them financially with the planned transformation of an old building into a hostel for pilgrims after they discovered the building was riddled with dry rot. I have no clue who is paying for the significant repairs suggested by the scaffolding in the far left of the photo.

Here’s my impression… as with Archbishop John Ireland’s determination to build the Cathedral in St Paul to be taller and in a more commanding location than the Minnesota State Capitol, I fully appreciate how important it was for the Trappists, and Irish Catholics in general, to erect a monumental edifice to make a profound statement regarding their presence and the restoration of their public practice of Catholicism in the 19th century.

But this is the 21st century. Times have changed. The practice of Catholicism in Ireland has shriveled. Thus, my further impression and belief… God certainly intends to foster the Cistercian/Trappist charism within the Church, but not as currently manifested in the “behemoth” planted in western County Waterford. When visiting and since, I felt nothing of the cloistered, contemplative asceticism I love and still find at New Melleray. Absent was any salient presence of my understanding of the rich, communal, singular dedication to God found in the Rule of Benedict; or even the vitality and joy I find at St John’s Abbey/Collegeville. What would Bernard of Clarevoux or the reformers of Our Lady of La Trappe counsel today? An ember burns. The Spirit hovers.

Loving the tradition as I do I’m left wondering, “What young person aspiring to the contemplative life of stability, obedience and conversion-of-life would be attracted to Mount Melleray today?” Not many, I am fairly confident. Similarly, I found the Abbey to be an apt expression of the contemporary Church whose tradition I love and cherish. It hovers as an invitation, a yearning — we all need to become much more humble, simple, God-centered, communal, and grounded in place/earth/creation. We need what the Benedictine tradition seeks, a thorough conversion of heart!

I talk a good talk and have noble aspirations. Yet, I like the consumer culture in which we are enmeshed and moribund Church structures I can so easily criticize, Mount Melleray Abbey stands as a symbol and indictment of me personally every bit as much as this faithful remnant of monks, the stifling clericalism of the Church or the dry rot found in so much of American culture.

Perhaps the most lingering impression and telling symbol in this photo is the graveyard lying in front of the edifice.  Finally, from death comes life!