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The following article was selected from the Internet Edition
of the Chicago Tribune. June, 2000
A SPECIAL KIND OF LIFE
By Jennifer Peltz
The church at St. Procopius Abbey, the crux of the sacred space in which 55 men devote their lives to God, has a basic oak table for an altar in a sanctuary bare of any ornaments except a crucifix.
"Sometimes people say, `You should put something on the wall,'" Father Christian Ceplecha admitted. "Well, we want attention on the altar, not the wall."
Everything at the Lisle abbey bespeaks a purposeful plainness, an appreciation for the arresting qualities of subtlety. When the monks describe their home and sanctuary, they just call it
"our place."
Monasticism, with its millenniums of tradition and mystery, is simply "the life."
It is a life in which prayers are conducted in song and breakfast in
silence, in keeping with almost 1,500-year-old roots and a 115-year local history that the monks know to be changing.
There is little need now for their original mission, ministering to
Czech immigrants. Only a handful of monks still teach in the schools they founded. Changes in the practice of Catholicism have reached into
their daily lives, and their numbers are dwindling in a
society that, while polls may show interest in religion has not fluctuated dramatically for decades, seems ever more secular to men who, in many cases, became monks a half-century ago.
"We live, in some respects, a life that is countercultural," Father Christian said. It is a life that has had many interesting encounters with the world outside the abbey's brick
walls, however. Despite their own seclusion and silence, the monks for decades published not one but three newspapers. The abbey itself is prized not only by the Benedictines but also by the
American Institute of Architects, which has given it at least three awards. And the story of the monks on the hill in Lisle is intertwined with the politics of World War II and the rise of
communism in both Europe and Asia.
The story began in 6th Century Italy, when a young man named Benedict created the first monastic community in the Roman Catholic Church. His followers
arrived in Chicago in 1885, when they were asked to provide "classical education and to help to raise up a Czech culture of lay leaders" among the Czechs flocking to the city's Pilsen
neighborhood, said Father Christian, the abbey historian and a former history professor.
Within 10 years, the monks had started a boys high school and three Czech-language,
Catholic-oriented newspapers. Within 20 years, they had turned 350 acres of Lisle farmland along Maple Avenue west of Yackley Avenue into a hub of Catholic activity, launching an orphanage, a
college and a seminary while the Benedictine Sisters started a girls high school next door. The boys and girls schools ultimately merged to become Benet Academy, and the college eventually became
Benedictine University.
But while busy in Lisle in the 1930s, the monks also took on far-flung and difficult projects. Brothers running a mission in China were detained in the Japanese
occupation of China during World War II, then
forced out of China during its communist revolution. The mission moved to Taiwan, where two monks remain today.
In Czechoslovakia, monks from
St. Procopius revived an abbey from the devastation of the war only to be swept out of that country, too, after a communist coup. A symbol of the struggle followed them home. For
years, there had been talk of building a replica of a statue of the Virgin Mary that once stood in Prague. Built in thanksgiving for the defeat of Swedish forces in the 1600s, it had been torn down
in the angry wake of World War I.
In the 1950s, a copy was installed at St. Procopius as a sign of hope for the end of communism. Hundreds made pilgrimages to it before the mid-1990s, when,
with the communist regime gone, the statue was given to a Prague abbey.
Father Christian, 72, was on hand for much of this, having entered St. Procopius in 1945. He was there as the
Czech population assimilated, the newspapers stopped publishing, the seminary closed and the monks' roles shrank at the schools. He saw the end of Latin at mass and silence at lunch and watched a
community of more than 100 men shrink to about 55.
He now lives in a place with a cloistered area to screen out the outside world and a World Wide Web site to invite it in.
St.
Procopius isn't alone in such changes. In the last 35 years, the number of men in Roman Catholic religious communities in the United States has fallen nearly 40 percent, although the nation's
Catholic population has grown about 30 percent, according to Catholic research groups. . Experts point to spiritual factors, like the Second Vatican Council's moves to give lay people a greater role in
the church, and secular ones, like smaller families that seem less likely to encourage a son to enter a monastery.
But life at St. Procopius remains the same in spirit, if not always in practice,
the monks say. It's a life that still calls for a vow of poverty, a respect for silence, a premium on self-discipline and a lifelong commitment not only to monasticism but to St.
Procopius. And it still calls to people, if fewer of them. Four men are in the four-year process of joining St. Procopius for life, and a fifth is applying, said Brother Guy Jelinek, the monk
charged with seeking out those who are seeking God.
He knows he is offering a life of compromises for the common good in a culture that prizes the pursuit of individual goals, a life that requires
a permanent commitment in an era of changed careers and broken marriages. He thinks that is part of its appeal.
He says he meets hundreds of prospects each year--some looking for a retreat
from failed relationships, some for a retirement home. As much as the abbey would like to grow, he steers them elsewhere.
The people who stay "are probably exactly the same as
the people who were coming 50 or 100 years ago," said Brother Guy, 48. "They tend not to be caught up in the frills of year 2000 American culture." They are, he said, "people who
realize they don't know everything there is to know. People who aren't scared of dealing with the mystery of God."
They are people like Austin Murphy, 26, who entered the abbey
after receiving an economics degree from the University of Chicago. Although raised in a churchgoing Catholic household, he had no intention of entering religious life until what he describes as a
conversion experience during his freshman year. "I kind of felt a certain uneasiness about it when I felt called," he said. Some friends didn't know what to think, and neither did
now-Brother Austin, who will admit he at times thought "marriage would have been a nice thing."
"A very natural or normal reaction is to think you're giving up so much and it
is a sacrifice, but it can be a very fulfilling one," he explained. "You give up lesser joys in expectation of a more fulfilling one. "It kind of takes some faith."
Brother Austin, who teaches mathematics at Benet Academy, may make his lifelong vows as soon as this summer. If he does, he will join a family ranging in age from 22 to 87 and in occupation from
business
management to beekeeping, a family that embraces a member as garrulous as Brother Guy and one as reserved as Father Christian.
"We're all very different," Brother Guy said, "but somehow God has thrown a rope around us."
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