6/10/2010 12:39:00 PM
Catholics get historical insight from monk
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LAFAYETTE — Members of the Oregon Catholic Historical Society and guests got an inside look at some Oregon monastic history during a gathering at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey.
Trappist Father Martinus Cawley, a monk for 58 years and a historian, told the three dozen attendees stories like this:
A priest came to Oregon in the late 19th century and saw an unchurched culture keen mostly on making money. He thought the place would benefit from a religious community that could show a more spiritual way. It so happened that his sister was a nun in the Sisters Adorers of the Precious Blood, a cloistered contemplative community founded in Canada in 1861.
In 1891, the nuns were welcomed to Oregon. After a brief stay at a former Benedictine convent in Gervais, they moved into their monastery on the slopes of Mount Tabor, across from Ascension Parish.
Life in Oregon was not easy for the Sisters, who wore habits of white and bright red. The new convent was drafty and some of the younger women died in the Oregon dampness.
In 1911, a bright young lady from California came to the monastery. Mother Trinity, as she became known, would be a dynamic leader for decades. A new monastery was completed in 1932. As the community grew, groups were sent to found communities in China, Japan, Alaska and other sites.
The nuns, Father Cawley says, were “darlings of the local church” receiving much support and making people feel good.
In 1967, there were 34 nuns at the convent.
By the 1980s, the Portland community had shrunk, due in part to missionary dispersion and also to changes in church life. The monastery was sold to become a care home and the sisters moved to nearby Ascension Parish. The women would eventually leave Oregon altogether and join houses on the East Coast.
For the history conference, the Australian-born Father Cawley also told the story of the first Trappist foundation in Oregon, near Jordan. Near the turn of the last century, French monks fled their native country and began an attempt to start a lumber enterprise near Jordan. But the eight miles through mud made it hard to get logs to the nearest rail depot, in Scio. Then the mill machinery broke. The Trappists cancelled insurance to save money and soon fire destroyed the mill and the work was lost. The Trappist effort in the state was done by 1910, not to resume until 1955 when a group of men came from New Mexico to begin the abbey here.
Father Cawley, who had joined in New Mexico, recalls the unfriendly stares of suspicious Oregonians as the monks came to Yamhill County.
One man stood up at a public meeting and confronted the farmer who had sold land to the monks. The seller said in return to his interlocutor: “These men spend all day praying for scoundrels like you.”
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