ARTICLES

The Kansas-Oklahoma Miracle

UNFLINCHING FRENCH BENEDICTINES MAKE U.S. BEACHHEAD

Travellers at the airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a provincial city in the American Midwest, witnessed an unusual sight one day earlier this year. Standing at a public telephone near Gate 30 were two Benedictine monks in their black habits and a priest in a clerical suit. The priest and one of the monks wore pectoral crosses. The monks were waiting to board a plane for Atlanta and a connecting flight to France, where they are members of a monastic community who in 1991 celebrated the 900th anniversary of their foundation. The younger monk, an American, dialed the phone number of a private house in Kansas. After speaking for a few minutes, he gave the phone to his Abbot, a Frenchman. He in turn, when he was finished, turned the phone over to the Bishop. The scene alone was striking enough--the Catholic who saw it might have been reminded of a letter written by Father Faber, superior of the Oratory of St Philip Neri in London, to Newman in Birmingham, describing a walk taken by some of his priests: "The Fathers have just left in their cassocks and the high languid collar of the Oratory for their afternoon constitutional in St James' Park, dispelling invincible ignorance everywhere they go."

If the scene at the Tulsa airport that winter's day was striking, the words spoken were even more so. The young American monk began, "Mr. Senior, this is Father Philip Anderson"--pause--"Philipus!" He went on to give an account of the 12-day visit, just coming to an end, which he and his Abbot had made to Oklahoma. When the Abbot took the phone, he spoke as an old friend, and asked the professor
on the other end of the line about his health. Then the Bishop took the phone, and any bystander could hear him describing his gratitude and admiration for the work the professor and his colleagues had done. And then the Bishop said, "The project of a new monastery in my diocese would never have come to pass if it were not for you and your work at the University. Dr. Senior, I am praying to Cardinal Newman every day for you, and asking the priests and people of my Diocese to do the same."

The Bishop was the Most Reverend Edward Slattery of the Diocese of Tulsa. The Abbot was the Right Reverend Dom Antoine Forgeot, superior of the Abbey of Fontgombault (Indre) in France. The young monk was Dom Philip Anderson, Prior of the Abbey of Triors (Drome), a daughterhouse of Fontgombault established in 1984 near Lyon. Their interlocutor in Kansas was Father Anderson's sometime professor, John Senior, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence. Identifying the speakers is easily done, but explaining that extraordinary conversation requires more than a few lines.

In 1970, at the height--or more accurately, the nadir--of the student upheavals which were at the heart of the social revolution which shook the West as profoundly as the Communist Revolution of 1917 shook Russia, with the same destructive consequences for the human happiness of individuals and the common good of society, three professors, Frank Nelick, Dennis Quinn, and John Senior, received a grant from the American government to begin "an experiment in tradition" at Kansas University. They established a course of studies in the liberal arts, first known simply and elegantly as Pearson College, a name later changed to the more bureaucratic-sounding Integrated Humanities Program. This program, for first- and second-year undergraduates and undergraduettes, was a four-semester sequence of classes in which the students read the Great Books of Western civilization. Many studied Latin, taught orally. For the purposes of this article, it will be enough to give Pearson College's motto and say a word about it.

Nascantur in admiratione. Let them be born in wonder. Aristotle in the Metaphysics says that philosophy begins in wonder. By 'wonder' he does not mean the vice of curiosity, by which, for example, men are tempted to read newspapers and watch the evening news on television. He is speaking of the thing we experience when we look up at the starry sky or enter Chartres Cathedral or behold a "tall ship" with all her sails catching the wind, cutting through the sea. It is the wonder that the cowboy knew who sang, in words that became part of the state song of Kansas:

How often at night/When the heavens are bright/With the light of the glittering stars/Have I stood there amazed/And asked as I gazed/If their glory exceeds that of ours.

Home, home on the range. . . .

This passion of wonder that Aristotle wrote about, and that every man, no matter how debased, has the capacity for, is the reason that men create poetry, understanding that word in the broadest sense: not only poems, but also stories, plays, dance, music, ultimately everything man makes or does that is not merely useful, but for his delight. In Pearson College, Mr. Senior (he earned a Ph.D. at Columbia, but eschews the pretentious title Doctor, in a gesture reminiscent of C.S. Lewis' saying that the only people who get doctorates are Americans and women) and his colleagues taught, and asked their students to read, poetically--to study Plato and Chaucer and Shakespeare in order to know and to understand and ultimately to love the world better. The professors did not seek to cram facts into their students' skulls in the fashion of Thomas Gradgrind. Still less did they wish to "deconstruct" or debunk the texts read in their classes. They wished their students to read the Odyssey and the Aeneid and the Song of Roland in the spirit St Benedict enjoined in the opening lines of the Holy Rule: "Hearken, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart."

The heart. The great books of our civilization (by which the present writer does not mean Hegel or Marx or Sylvia Plath) are not addressed only or chiefly to the mind. They speak to men's hearts. "Were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke to us on the way?" Not our feelings, not our intellects--our hearts. Just as women are prone to emotionalism, men (viri) are prone to rationalism, and one is as disordered as the other. Great teachers teaching the great books in the poetic mode to docile (the word is not an obscenity) students--this dymanic will move hearts and give a true integration to the human person with all its faculties. If grace is allowed to work, as it was at K.U. thanks to the example of three Catholic professors who simply lived their Faith, the results can be remarkable. In Pearson College, the results were extraordinary. Hundreds of students sought instruction in the Catholic Faith (freely, it should hardly be necessary to add). And a few, sometimes to the sorrow of their families, sought to live out the promises of their baptism in the most radical way possible: by embracing the monastic life.

In 1972, some Pearson students visited Rome and stayed in a hostel run by nuns who told them about a Benedictine monastery in an out-of-the-way part of France, where the demands of Christ's Gospel, as distilled by St Benedict in his Rule, were not flinched at. This monastery, Notre-Dame de Fontgombault, whose magnificent Romanesque abbey church was dedicated in 1144, seemed to these students a veritable incarnation of the poetic and the 'wonder-full' as the students had learned it from their professors at K.U. The Christian and Benedictine life lived by the monks at Fontgombault was as beautiful and wonderful as the abbey church. And the liturgy at Fontgombault was the crown of everything else the students found there--entirely in Latin, chanted in the ancient Gregorian tones, according to St Benedict and St Pius V's arrangement of the liturgical hours and the Mass.

In the years after 1972, dozens of young Jayhawks (the symbol of K.U.) stayed in the guesthouse at Fontgombault--so many by Christmas 1977 that the Abbot spoke of an American invasion. Some entered the novitiate. Eight persevered. They deserve to be named here: Father Francis Bethel of Wichita, Kansas, Father Lawrence Brown, Father Philip Anderson, Father Matthew Shapiro, Father Francis Bales, and Brother Martin Markey, all of Kansas City, Kansas, Father Francis Xavier Brown of Los Angeles, and Brother Joseph-Marie Owen of Oregon.

Two former students of Pearson College--'loveliest of all', in the words of one writer formerly associated with it--Mere Marie-Dolores Anderson of Kanas, and Mere Marie-Kristen Epperson of Oklahoma, have become nuns at the cloistered Benedictine convent at Jouques, near Marseille, where the spirit and the monastic observance and the liturgy are identical to Fontgombault's.

The fecundity of this last quarter century of silent, hidden preparation and prayer and receptivity is now evident. The American monks of la famille fontgombaudienne (in the Abbot's beautiful phrase), along with two Canadians and some heroic Frenchmen, are preparing to return to their homeland to establish a new monastery, on 1200 acres of land near Lost City in the Ozark Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. Last August 15, the Father Abbot of Fontgombault, Dom Forgeot, and Bishop Slattery of Tulsa, part of a new generation of bishops who do not seem to suffer any delusions about the state of the world or the Church, signed a charter formally establishing the new monastery, Annunciation Priory of Clear Creek. In January of this year, 1999, Dom Forgeot and Father Anderson travelled to Oklahoma to make more definite plans for the new monastery. They met some of the priests and layfolk of the Diocese, and had the joy of travelling to St Louis, Missouri, with Bishop Slattery, to see the Holy Father. And at the last, twenty minutes before boarding the plane to return to France, they had the telephone conversation described above. The man who more than any other is responsible for the miracle of the new monastery at Clear Creek, John Senior, was gravely ill. He had the consolation of speaking to his godchild, Philip Anderson, now his father in Christ, and to the prelates. Many prayers have been poured forth to God and His Servant, John Henry Newman, that He would spare Mr Senior so that he can see for himself the choicest fruit of his work as a teacher, Clear Creek Priory, and the living stones from which it is to be built, his old students.

The author, a freelance journalist, is a member of Sacred Heart Parish in Miami, Oklahoma. This article first appeared in Oriens: Journal of the Australian Ecclesia Dei (website: www.ozemail.com.au/~oriens/)