Blue Cloud Abbey (sd Benedictine Monks) Closing

[Maximilianus]

[quote name='Gemma' timestamp='1340122992' post='2446317']
Also has to do with publicity. If vocations don't know a monastery is in their backyard (exaggeration, but you know what I mean), that monastery will end up closing due to lack of vocations.

Blessings,
Gemma
[/quote]

Yup, hard to get vocations if no one knows you exist.

Edited June 20, 2012 by Maximilianus

[AnneLine]

Part of this is being in South Dakota. That isn't intended as an insult at all -- it is pure reality. Two years ago my husband and I drove from the West Coast to Minneapolis... and while I knew that SD was not well populated, I truly had no idea what that meant until we drove through that state. If it is hard for most monasteries to have attracted vocations over the last years, isolation would have made it even more difficult.

As far as the habits in the picture, most benedictine communities of men have worn lay clothes doing manual work for a long time... and they seem to wear their habits in many/most of the pictures. They seem to have had good ministries and a good prayer life... all they were lacking was new vocations.

Additionally, I think Lisa, Gemma and Max raise a good point. It really isn't about a habit in this context, it is about timing and about people knowing you exist. The Summit Dominicans and Marbury Dominicans went for something like 20 years without a profession... and the Poor Clares in Barhamsville had a LONG period without novices (until recently those in white veils also show up on their photos in black veils!). If God wants the community to survive, the people will come; but after a certain point, there just aren't enough religious who are able to form new candidates properly... and that is when a difficult decision like this one has to be made.

They have my love and respect, and my prayers. I can't imagine how hard it must be for a man who has vowed stability to his abbot and community to have to radically obey in this way. In once sense, it is the ultimate act of openness to God's will to let go of all those externals and to seek where God would have them go next. I am praying for them....

[Fr. Antony Maria OSB]

Like AnneLine said, probably a big reason that they weren't getting vocations is due to their area. Blue Cloud was founded to serve as a mission to the Native Americans living in that area. Unfortunately, they never received any Native American vocations, so I'm sure that had a large impact in addition to the sparse population.

As to the habit/no habit thing, as was also pointed out above, Benedictine monks will wear a habit at prayer and other communal activities, but not while doing physical labor: it would get a tad bit difficult tilling the garden which grows the vegetables you eat at lunch and dinner wearing a habit and having a scapular fly about in the wind

Edited June 21, 2012 by NazFarmer