H.M.S Cistercian

My recent pilgrimage to the monastery of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky has deepened my appreciation for the writings of the abbey’s most famous monk, Thomas Merton. I have been reading with much enjoyment Merton’s lively history of the Order of the Cisterians of the Strict Observance, also known as the Trappists. The book, The Waters of Siloe, describes the origin of the order and how persecuted French monks came to the shores of the United States to establish the monastery where Merton spent his hidden contemplative life.

Having been inspired by Bruce Charlton and the writers at the Junior Ganymede blog to read a bit of Mormon history, I have found my admiration for the Mormon founders and pioneers growing steadily. The hardships and persecutions these people endured were incredible and touching and epic. Similarly, Merton’s detailed descriptions of the sufferings and tribulations of the bands of starving monks who established monasteries has filled me with wonder and, yes, love for those men of the past who deliberately followed Christ into obscurity and privation and silence.

One early section of the book touches on some of the Trappists’ persecutions, and also provided a delightful tidbit of historical and literary trivia:

A French decree of March 23, 1793, imposed on all priests and religious the obligation of swearing allegiance to the constitutional government under pain of deportation. Since the government was frankly atheistic, and since it was constantly threatening to wipe out the last traces of the Catholic religion in France, this oath was one that could not make a very strong appeal to a truly Christian conscience. It meant the final dispersal of the monks of the Strict Observance…

…The prior of La Trappe, Father Francis Xavier Brunel, and another priest, Father Anthony Joseph Dujonquoi, were arrested in 1793, before they could reach the Swiss border. Like many other Trappists from different parts of France, they were put into one of the numerous chain gangs converging upon Rochefort, where they were interned in the pontoons. These pontoons were ancient hulks moored in the harbor…[and were] under the command of a pair of blood-thirsty degenerates of the kind that not even the pen of a Victor Hugo could exaggerate….We can judge what the conditions must have been, from the remark of a physician who happened to see the prisoners packed together in the dark and airless hold, so tight they could hardly move and could not even lie at full length on the floor. He said: ‘If you kenneled four hundred dogs in that place overnight, you would find them, the next morning, either dead or mad.’ Dressed in rags, the interned priests and monks were kept from death by starvation only by buckets of slops which were thrown to them to scoop up and devour with their bare hands. Eaten up by vermin and plagued by scurvy, they died by the score…

Fever, plague, dysentery, scurvy, and a score of other torments killed them off like flies. Half the time, the living were too feeble to bury the dead. It did not occur to the soldiers of the Republic to do it for them. They were probably deep in ecstatic meditations on the liberty, equality, and fraternity which they were bringing to the world. But the echoes of the rhetoric of 1789 and 1790, the scandalized outcry of the committee that learned that one of the monks of La Trappe had had a nervous breakdown, had all long since been drowned in two reigns of terror, and no one seemed to recall this particular inconsistency. If they did, they were too worn out to appreciate the joke.

However, there is one bright spot in the story. The prison ship on which one of the monks of La Trappe was sailing with a cargo of other condemned men to Guiana was intercepted on the high seas by H.M.S. “Indefatigable,” under the command of Sir Edward Pellew. He boarded his prize, and, recognizing the nature of his capture, he said, not without a certain unexpected delicacy: ‘Fathers, this is the richest booty I have ever taken.’ He transferred them all to the British man-of-war and landed them at Plymouth, where they found freedom and refuge until the fall of Napoleon…

from The Waters of Siloe by Thomas Merton (1949 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, Inc., New York, NY) pp. 55-57

Anyone who shares my enjoyment of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower books will recognize the name of Captain Sir Edward Pellew, who was one of the early commanders who recognized and nurtured young Midshipman Hornblower’s prowess as a naval officer. I will confess that — as fond as I am of the Hornblower novels and the 1990’s A&E Network miniseries based on the books — I have never done any digging into the historical connection of any of the characters. I was absolutely delighted to learn that Captain Pellew was a real person, and that he assisted the Trappist monks at one of the most wretched periods in their history.

~ S.K. Orr