MONASTERY CLOSING

There goes another monastery! The Notre Dame of Calvary Abbey in Rogersville, New Brunswick, Canada, has closed. The reason: lack of monks. The Trappist monastery has been there since 1902. They made money by selling produce from their gardens and orchards. At one time, there were 30 monks living there; now there’s just three monks. (* Mickey, Mike and Davy. Peter monk left awhile ago.) Father Innocent Ugyeh, the man who runs the monastery, said, “Three people cannot form a monastery. We can’t run it with just three. We tried so many things for recruitment.” The monastery is dedicated to prayer and monks embrace solitude and silence as the two indispensable elements in their life.
* Kind of hard to invite people to join when you embrace solitude and silence.
* Anyway, when they hit 30 they were breaking their own “solitude” rule.
* Maybe they should have hired a sign-spinner to work the streets.
* Did they try everything? Did they try pickleball? A brew pub with a taproom? An AirBNB?
* Oh, well. Time to move on from being “monks” to being “hermits.”
* No more monky business.