Word: cistercian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...damp green hills of Brittany stands Abbaye de Boquen, a small 12th century monastery, where cloistered Cistercian monks have prayed and tilled the soil in silent serenity for centuries. In recent years, though, the monastery has welcomed the outside world with a sign at the gate proclaiming: "The brothers would like you to share in their search for spiritual unity and liberty." Since 1964, the abbey has been a center for audacious innovation under its prior, Dom Bernard Besret...
Last week a new prior arrived in Boquen. Dom Besret (pronounced beret) had been summoned to Rome and dismissed for threatening to destroy the monastic concept. Cistercian superiors were unmoved by his pleas to be permitted to stay on as "president" of a more open community. Explained a Vatican official privately: "If you are going to have a monastery, you must have a monastery. It can't be a country club...
...please my father, tease the Pope, and spite the devil," Martin Luther, a former Augustinian monk, married Catherine von Bora, a 26-year-old former Cistercian nun. The event horrified Catholic Christendom, set the precedent for all future Protestant divines, and led the humanist Erasmus to remark that the Reformation "had started out like a tragedy, but ended as all comedies doin a wedding." Now from East Germany comes word that Luther's wedding ring, missing since World War I, has apparently been rediscovered in the keeping of a Schonberg family. Engraved on it are the names...
...fathers refused to hand over 222 Cathari heretics, the crusaders broke in and massacred every man, woman and child-priests included-of Béziers' 20,000 inhabitants. Before the massacre one of the crusaders is said to have asked his leader, Abbe Arnaud Amalric, head of the Cistercian monastic order, how to distinguish between the heretics and the faithful. "Kill them all," was the abbot's alleged reply. "God will recognize his own!" From then on, the crusade became a war without mercy, in which almost any southern Frenchman was assumed to be a heretic. Historians estimate...
...winding road in the Prades mountains, inland from the ancient Spanish city of Tarragona, stands the Cistercian monastery of Poblet, a place that is hard to get to and equally difficult to leave behind. It was founded in the middle of the 12th century by monks imported from the Fontfroide monastery in France. As always with Cistercian monasteries, the monks had picked their site with a view to maintaining a balance between the spiritual and the useful. In the center of the main cloister bubbled a pure natural spring. The surrounding fields were and are fertile, and the blue...