Brother, has this renewal of the orders effected the mendicant orders just as strongly as it has the monks? I ask because, I have noticed that I sometimes see Sister at
our local Monastery in pink and also blue habits if they wear one at all. I know this is only a minor detail, but I have also seen monks whom have seemed to embrace the more secluded and contemplative route. I have read your post concerning this renewal, but you have not mentioned the monastic orders such as, the Carthusian’s, Bernardines (as my family called them in Ky.) and of course the Benedictines in much detail; has this renewal effected all the orders across the board equally? Have all the orders embraced it as the Friers have?
You know, you have probably asked the most intelligent question in this thread so far, because it gives us a chance to explore another area of Catholic Tradition.
Let’s start off by answering your question and saying, “Yes.” The renewal through recovery, as I call it has certainly involved the cloistered communities, probably more so than the mendicants.
Before I give a few examples, it’s important to understand a few things. First of all, the Carthusians and Benedictines are organized very differently.
While mendicants are one order with a central government, Benedictines and Carthusians are not one order.
The Benedictine family is a family of monks. The Carthusians are a family of hermits. That’s their first big difference.
In both families each house is autonomous. Therefore, renewal takes place house by house. Each house looks at its fidelity to the founder’s vision and charism and then adjusts. You can have many things happening in different houses under the same name. While one Benedictine house is working on its liturgical life, another may be working on its community life or its government. In other words, they are all revisiting every aspect of Benedictine life, but not looking at the same aspects at the same time. The same is true of the Carthusians.
The Carthusians are to the contemplative life what the Jesuits are to the mendicants. The Carthusians live an enclosed life. They are an order, but they are an exception to every rule that governs enclosed orders.
First of all, they never had a rule of life. All enclosed orders follow a rule of life: Benedict, Basil, Carmel, Augustine, or Francis. The Carthusians do not. St. Bruno did not want them to have a rule, because if they had a rule, they would be stuck to it. By having statutes that they could change according to the needs of the times, they never had to do a major overhaul of their lives. As times change, they change one statute here and another there. They make these changes house by house. Not every house is following the same statutes. They build on the statutes of St. Bruno. They keep certain common elements between them, such as the physical structure of their houses and their infrastructure.
For example, the Carthusians have the Fathers and the Brothers. The Fathers are obviously priests. They are in total solitude 6/7 days a week. They come out of their hermitages on Sundays and holidays. The Brothers are not priests and they live in community, even though they never talk to each other unless it’s absolutely necessary. Their vocation is to run the place. They pray less, because they have to do the administration, manual labor and whatever else it takes to keep their house up and running. The Fathers never do any work other than chop wood for their stoves. Literally, they don’t even do their own laundry. The Brothers do it. There is no excuse for not praying. With them, you don’t see major changes, because they have been doing them all along.
The Benedictines come in several packages. There are the original Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Trappists, the Camaldolese and a few others that I can’t recall. They live in community as do the friars. However, unlike the friars, each house is autonomous. There is no Superior General. Houses group together to form congregations. They have cooperation between them. But at the end of the day, the Abbot is Christ. He is the only person who can reform anything. He is to be obeyed and never questioned.
The abbot reforms the liturgy. He creates the Breviary that they follow. Which always makes me chuckle on CAF. I see so many Traditionalists wishing to pray the Divine Office according to the traditional form. I always tell myself, “Do they know that there are as many Benedictine forms of the Divine Office as there are Benedictine congregations?” The Monastic Diurnal is only a reference or guide. The abbot decides how they use it, if they use it at all and how much they use. The abbot decides if they pray it in Latin, English or Chinese. No one has the power to question him. This is true of the entire family, including the offspring: Cistercians, Trappists, Camalolese, etc.
The biggest and most noticeable renewal among them has been declericalization. They too fell into the pattern of ordaining and ordaining. St. Benedict never had this in mind. They were to be a brotherhood with a few priests to celebrate mass for them and hear their confessions.
However, as they built new houses in areas where there was a shortage of priests, the bishops asked them cover. They ran parishes and would return to the abbey when not involved in the parish. This was not part of their tradition. They had often ran schools on their abbey grounds, but not parishes. The monks did not leave the abbey to take care of parishes. They left the abbey for many reasons, but parishes was not one of them.
