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REPORTAGE
from issue no. 11 - 2011

“We are not greater than our Fathers”


At Le Barroux, near Avignon, the Benedictine community founded by Dom Gérard Calvet has flourished for forty years in strict observance of the Rule and in love of the ancient liturgical tradition of the Church


by Giovanni Ricciardi


The church of Le Barroux [© Massimo Quattrucci]

The church of Le Barroux [© Massimo Quattrucci]

 

From the windows of the Le Barroux monastery the sky of Provence is a blue flag taut in the wind. The mistral strikes it with violence at times: on some winter days it can gust at up to two hundred miles an hour on the nearby mountains. The olive trees and vineyards do not appear to suffer, but the vegetation is mostly low, Mediterranean shrub, it seems, apart from the cypress trees, artfully placed to suggest that one looks upwards from these walls. Under the sky the dark mass of Mont Ventoux rises like a regular cone. This is where on Good Friday 1336 Francesco Petrarch with his brother Gherardo made the famous ‘ascent’, described in a letter to his Augustinian friend Dionigi of Borgo San Sepolcro, who had started him on reading the Confessions. At the end of the climb, the poet read his brother a randomly chosen passage from Book X, in which Augustine writes: “Men go to admire the peaks of the mountains, the great waves of the sea and the vast currents of the rivers, the round of the ocean and the orbits of the stars, and do not heed to themselves”.
In his continuing struggle between a love of earthly things and the yearning for those of heaven, Petrarch envied Gherardo, who was a friar, that detachment, that freedom that had allowed him to climb the mountain fast and light, without the weight that was holding down the poet.

 

A history of fidelity to Tradition
Precisely here, forty years ago, on 22 August 1970, another Gherardo, to be exact Gérard Calvet, a French Benedictine, came on a motorcycle, with his kit on the luggage rack, the blessing of the abbot of the monastery from which he came, and settled in the small chapel of Bédoin, dedicated to St Mary Magdalene. In the turbulent years of the post-conciliar period, he only wanted to continue his monastic life without being subject to those ‘experiments’ in doctrinal or liturgical renewal, which seemed to him much poorer than the rich ‘ancient and ever new’ tradition of prayer, silence, manual labor, functions in Latin, traditional liturgy.
His choice had been for loneliness, and it did not last long. Three days after his arrival, a young man arrived at Bédoin and asked to be received as a novice. Dom Gérard, surprised and unsure what to do, replied that he did not know how to take him in, but the young man’s insistence won the day. After eight years there were 11 monks in the community: the chapel, with the little ruined priory, that had been promptly restored, thus became too small for the new monastery. But the growth of the foundation, aided by Dom Gérard’s abbot, went on.
The attachment to the traditional liturgy won the sympathy in those years of Archbishop Lefebvre, who in July 1974 proceeded to celebrate the first ordinations of the monks. This provoked the reaction of the abbot who had initially favored the choice of Dom Gérard, and ordered him to close the monastery. The community was thus excluded from the Congregation of the Benedictines of Subiaco.
Faced with this either-or, Dom Gérard chose the thorny path of continuing with the foundation, saddened by the rift, but believing in his heart that love of the centuries-long liturgical tradition of the Church could not be at variance with the heart of faith, with fidelity to the Pope, and that God would find a way to solve a situation that had become canonically irregular. In 1980 he took farewell of Bédoin and the first stone was laid of the new monastery in the town of Le Barroux, between Mont Ventoux and the ‘Dentelles’ of Montmirail, a neo-Romanesque building, bare and basic, which was completed in little more than a decade.
Meanwhile, the rift between Lefebvre and the Church had deepened, although Dom Gérard continued to hope in a coming together. So when in 1988, with the motu proprio ‘Ecclesia Dei’, Pope John Paul II yielded to the demands of the Catholic ‘traditionalists’, allowing them, under certain conditions, to celebrate according to the pre-conciliar rite, it was a day of celebration at the monastery of Le Barroux. Dom Gérard had always told his monks that if they did not suffer from the canonically unresolved situation of the monastery, it meant that they did not really love the Church. And when Monsignor Lefebvre, not trusting the offers from Rome, proceeded in that same year to ordain various bishops without the consent of the Pope, thereby inaugurating the schism, the monastery chose unwavering loyalty to Rome and broke with the movement of the French archbishop. Dom Gérard paid for this attachment to the Church by being rejected by the monastic foundation, meantime set up in Brazil from Le Barroux, which decided to remain faithful to Lefebvre’s ‘hard line’.
The following year, on 2 October 1989, Cardinal Gagnon, accompanied by the bishop of Avignon, solemnly consecrated the newly-built church of the monastery. That public act demonstrated the full unity of Le Barroux with the Catholic Church.

The monks singing the Office of Lauds at six o’clock in the morning [© Massimo Quattrucci]

The monks singing the Office of Lauds at six o’clock in the morning [© Massimo Quattrucci]

Daily life
In the light of the Provencal countryside the monastery seems today to live a life remote from the din of the ecclesial struggles and the news items of those years. Its bells accompany the life of a village that had at first received the newcomers with distrust and suspicion. The monks get up in the middle of the night to recite Matins in chorus, are awake before dawn to meditate in their cells on the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, come together at six in the monastery church for the singing of Lauds, then on the side altars those of them in orders ‘read’ mass in Latin according to the Roman Missal promulgated by John XXIII in 1962. A few faithful brave the morning cold to kneel and follow the liturgy in absolute silence. Then all begin the labors of the day.
The monastery is practically self-sufficient. The 52 monks (some of them very young, the average age is 46 years) that now make up the community (plus another 13 who have founded a new one in south-west France) live only by their work, according to the Benedictine tradition. The monastery land produces oil and wine, its bakery fulfills the needs of the community and sells biscuits, baguettes and pastries to the locals and tourists. Some years ago the monastery also opened a mill that offers olive-pressing to the rural community, using two millstones brought from Tuscany, and worked by modern machinery. The print shop also works at full capacity, not only printing missals with the traditional Roman rite, but also to meet the needs of the small publishing house founded by Dom Gérard. The Benedicite opens meals, which are vegetarian and consumed in silence, with guests seated in the center of the refectory, after being solemnly greeted by the abbot who washes their hands in sign of welcome. A reception that also includes a night shelter for those who do not have a roof in these parts under which to sleep. During lunch and dinner a monk reads a spiritual reading or sometimes even a history book or more general literature.


We are not greater than our Fathers
“The traditional liturgy is full of signals that remind us where the faith comes from, and teaches us that we are not greater than our Fathers, but only hand on what we have received”. There is no edge to the words of Father Abbot Louis-Marie, a friend and disciple of Dom Gérard, who passed care of the community onto him in 2003, resigning five years before his death. Moreover, the beauty experienced in this liturgy is not the exclusive prerogative of this monastery. Other monasteries in France today are adopting this form of prayer. The Abbot explains: “A bishop from the Ukraine once told me that in secularized France one seems to see a great spiritual desert, but in this desert there are some very beautiful oases”. Not only at Le Barroux. Something is moving, without the rigidity of the patterns of twenty years ago. The relationship between the monastery and the diocese of Avignon, in which Dom Gérard’s foundation lies, is not as tense as it once was. The abbot goes every year to concelebrate the Confirmation Mass with the bishop on Holy Thursday, and many priests of the diocese think well of this monastic experience, thus opening bridges with the French Church. More generally, Father Louis-Marie tells us, “people seem drawn here not only and exclusively because celebration is according to the Roman rite prior to the Council, but simply for the beauty of monastic prayer, for the Gregorian chant we use, because prayer is lived and felt here in the depths of a silence turned to God”.
Every year hundreds of priests mainly from France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain and Holland, spend a few days of retreat at Le Barroux, to speak with the monks or to learn how to celebrate Mass according to the old ritual. The monastery has about three hundred oblates among priests, lay people and families interested in Benedictine spirituality.
Vocations to Le Barroux, now at the rate of two or three a year, come from the most diverse origins. There is a young monk who left a career in the army, another who was an engineer in China and came across the Le Barroux internet site, a third who was twenty when he asked to be baptized by a priest in Marseilles, and then tried his vocation in a religious order that however turned out to be too ‘undemanding’. And so the priest brought him here, “because one of the things that attract people to a place like this”, explains the abbot, “is a free choice of evangelical radicalism”. Free and radical are the two adjectives that resonate most within these walls. Some Lefebvrists, not many to tell the truth, come to Le Barroux as a bridge for return to full communion with the Church, but also because, the abbot remarks, “sometimes in the Society of St Pius X they feel they breathe a thick air, characterized by what according to them could be called a clerical authoritarianism”.
It’s as if a different equilibrium can be found here, one not based on compromise, nor on the contrast with other ecclesial institutions, but simply on a return to the Rule of St Benedict as a way of approaching the heart of the Christian life. “In recent years,” adds the Father Abbot, “we have found that the monasteries that have bothered to innovate and revolutionize the forms of religious life today are those that have fewer vocations in France. I believe that in addition to the dynamism and vitality that they see in this young community, a gift that we have inherited from our founder, young people are attracted to Le Barroux by the radical nature of choice for God, as well as by the beauty of the liturgy which is celebrated here. But that isn’t everything, this is not the essential after all. When I came here myself, and fell in love with this place, from the sound of the bells to the attention given to celebrating the divine office, I immediately realized that the monastic life is nothing less than a holocaust, a total offering of oneself to God”.
In the evening, the bells summon everyone to Vespers, perhaps the most intimate and at the same time solemn moment of the community liturgy. While the sound of prayer spreads in the twilight hour, and the shadow of the crucifix above the altar stretches on the bare stone wall of the apse, everything seems suddenly clearer. And we hear the words with which the Abbot concludes this thinking of his on the fascination of this place: “The things I said are true, but secondary. The final attraction of a vocation is simply the good Lord. That is why a vocation, every vocation, remains fundamentally a mystery”.



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