The Conversation that is Monasticism
A Prinknash Oblate’s Contribution to the Conversation
Introduction
On the Feast of St Benedict a few years ago, during our annual Oblates’ conference at Prinknash, I
was sitting in choir before Lauds, finding my places in the old Antiphonale, (we now use the new
Antiphonale Monasticum) thinking how much I enjoyed still singing the Office in Latin and how
much my enjoyment of the Office in choir would be lessened if Latin were ever to be abandoned.
The reason I am sitting here in choir* is that I am a fully professed oblate member, ‘in union and
affiliation with my brethren and Abbot, of The Monastery of Our Lady and St Peter at Prinknash in
the County of Gloucester’. I am a Benedictine, no doubt about that; my profession here of some 20
years standing, and the fact I follow the Rule of St Benedict to the best of my ability every day, are
witness to that. But what exactly does it mean to be a Benedictine Oblate?
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines an oblate as ‘a person solemnly devoted [devoté or
vowed] to a monastery’ or ‘a person dedicated to monastic or religious life or work’. These
definitions should be enough but they never are. Although we may all have a clear idea of what we
mean by oblate, the term usually calls for lengthy and always incomplete explanations in order to
satisfy the majority of our friends and colleagues. It is often confused with ‘Tertiary’ which
represents a distinctly separately graded secular Third Order within a religious order, of friars rather
than monks. Oblates belong to a specific monastic community; tertiaries do not.
The object of this paper is to consider in some detail the implications of thinking of myself as a
Benedictine, a monastic oblate, or a secular monk. How can I describe myself accurately, in a way
that does not appear to claim too much; and does not by over inclusiveness seem to devalue other
ways of living out a monastic vocation? How can I describe myself in a way that does justice to the
promises and oblation I made at my profession?
In common with most of my fellow oblates, I live outside the walls of my monastery, and followed,
until my recent retirement, my own academic, management and psychoanalytic careers. The written
promises I made on joining the community are however still here ‘on the altar’ together with those of
all of my brethren sitting here beside me in choir. As Abbot Columba Marmion put it, in the idiom of
his day, ‘Is it not here [on the altar] on the blessed day of our vows, we all placed with our own
hands the chart of our monastic profession, thus uniting our oblation more closely to the Sacrifice of
Christ Jesus that it may rise up to God in the odour of sweetness?’
*A custom discontinued by the return to the Grange.
Some of us sitting here in these choir stalls are known as religious Benedictines in ‘vows’, and some
of us are oblate Benedictines whose vows are called ‘promises’. I suggest that we are both ‘regular’
in the sense of following the Rule of St Benedict. Religious vows no longer have any civil legal
status - exemption from jury or military service etc, and the canonical distinction between a solemn
vow and a simple perpetual vow has been discontinued. What might be the distinction between a
religious vow and a secular promise to follow the Rule and join the community? Unlike sacraments
such as marriage or ordination, both are dispensable.
The distinction between a vow and a promise has all but disappeared. Contemporary monastic
thinking (see Dom Vuillaume,) considers the monastic profession of all Benedictines, religious or
secular, to be a personal covenant with God, to be lived out in the company of our brethren. We have
all made the same commitment, as specified by our Rule. Each one of us lives out our monastic
covenant by observing the Rule appropriately, under Obedience, according to our circumstances. We
are all, each in our own particular way, participants in our monastic way of life.
When our Prinknash Community was on Caldy and still Anglican there were two kinds of monk;
Choir monks (some priests and some not) and oblates (conversi). The oblates were habited but were
exempted from vows and choir obligations. They performed all the manual labour later done by laybrothers. In 1919 those of the oblates who wished were transformed into lay-brothers (still called
conversi) with simple perpetual vows. In 1966, while forming half the Community of some 40
monks, the lay brothers were invited, in common with those of other Houses and Orders post Vatican
II, to take solemn vows. Some did and joined the choir, some did not but remained in the community,
and some left. One, brother, now Father Alphege Stebbens, our Sub Prior, was later ordained.
The Monastic Conversation
A few years ago I was dining in Hall at my University. I was in residence to explore some ideas
about organisations being conversational processes with a group of my post-graduate students who
were researching for Doctorates in Organisational Change. I was discussing concepts of emergent
patterning, or organising, from complexity (chaos) theory and from group psychoanalysis. A fellow
member of the Faculty, a fellow Fellow so to speak, sitting next to me at table, turned to me and said,
“Jones tells me that you say that you are some kind of a monk”. “Yes” I replied cautiously. “I do
sometimes say that”. Although I am many other things as well, I prepare to explain just how I might
sometimes describe myself as some kind of a monk, while clearly miles from the nearest monastery.
“No you are not”. He announced. “To belong to an Order you have to have taken vows of Poverty,
Chastity and Obedience”. My suggestion that this might not actually be ‘a fact universally
acknowledged’, and might rather depend on what you mean by ‘belong’ and ‘order’ was met with a
brisk rejection.
I observed to my colleague that what he said about vows might, indeed, apply to (Modern) Religious
Institutes but that we Benedictines do not belong to a Modern Institute or even an Ancient Order, but
to an independent monastery, albeit belonging to a Congregation (Subiaco Cassinese now in our
case). The Order of Saint Benedict (OSB) actually does not exist – very confusing; and we certainly
do not take the evangelical vows of Poverty Chastity and Obedience on profession. If he did not
believe me he only needs to consult the Rule of Saint Benedict. I protested that I similarly did not
take the three vows on becoming a religious member of the (Ancient) Order of Preachers many years
ago, but only Obedience, which is all Dominicans have ever taken. But this all sounded rather
defensive and I was clearly losing him.
What I would actually liked to have said is that just as ‘our final Conversation is in Heaven’ (Phil. 3.
v20 KJV), and just as we both participate in an academic conversation that is the Faculty in which
we are called Fellows, there is another conversation in which I participate, a monastic one, in which I
am called a Benedictine. Erasmus translated St John – ‘In the Beginning was the Conversation and
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the Conversation was with God and the Conversation was God’. The term Conversation is defined as
‘the action of living or having ones being, in or among others’. (Shorter OED).
I am particularly fond of the classical Italian painting convention devised by Fra Angelico and
known as the Sacra Conversatione. The Madonna is enthroned as Queen of Heaven with Infant,
surrounded by an assortment of saints and musically gifted angels, and cleverly including the viewer
in the perspective of the scene; a snapshot so to speak of a conversational day in heaven that one
might hope to look forward to. One of Bellini’s best examples, now in S. Zaccaria in Venice, is my
favourite, and there is a copy of it here on the wall of my study.
The Monastic Profession
Ideally I would have joined my colleague in a discursive post-prandial debate on the meaning of
monasticism as a social object, using the terminology of G. H. Mead and the Chicago Pragmatist
School of Social Philosophers. That is, the term ‘monastic’ refers to a relational conversational
process rather than a personal attribute; and the meaning of the term monk is a relational statement of
belonging and not an individual characteristic. The term ‘Monk’ refers to an individual but an
individual as a social object. It is only meaningful in relationship. Other examples of social objects
are, appropriately, the terms ‘Spouse’ and ‘Fellow’.
One can only be a Benedictine of a particular community. Our community is our monastic home in
which we are united to a particular Benedictine Family, as Brother Benet Tvedten put it in his book
‘How to be a Monastic and not Leave your Day Job’. It is all summed up in the three fold promise
of the monastic profession, made by us all in one form or another, based on the Latin original:
‘Stabilitate sua, Conversatione morum suorum, et Obœdientia.’ RB, 57.7.
The Latin can be and is translated variously, but I would defend my own:
1. A life-long commitment to this particular community; with Salvation specifically
guaranteed in the rite of profession as the reward for perseverance for life (Mt 10, 22.)
2. A commitment to enter fully into this Conversation which is the daily relational life of
this particular monastic community, to the very best of [my] abilities and circumstances.
3. To accept the guidance of the Community in the context of the Rule – and in particular
the Abbot - as the normative principle of the life of the Conversation.
The excellent edition of the rule – ‘The Rule of St Benedict 1980’, known as RB80, – contains a
discussion on these promises, or rather this one tripartite promise, which is invaluable
The fact the English wording may be different in the religious and oblate professions can be
misleading. The single threefold promise - to join in the conversation - however expressed or
translated, can only have one meaning in practice. At a profession ceremony at Ampleforth recently
I noticed that they avoided translating ‘Conversatione morum suorum’ at all but still used the Latin.
Our actual rite of profession asks, inter alia:
• Will you undertake the reformation of your life according to the spirit of the rule of our Holy
Father Saint Benedict, and the Customs of our Oblates? – I Will
• Will you persevere in your holy resolution until Death? – With the help of God I Will.
The Novice then makes his act of profession:
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“I offer myself to Almighty God, to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to Our Holy Father Saint Benedict
for the monastery of Prinknash. And I promise before God and all the Saints to remodel my manner
of life in conformity with the spirit of the Rule and the Customs of the Oblates. Uphold me O Lord
according to your word and I shall live. Let me not be disappointed in my hope”.
The Abbot replies:
“I as God’s representative accept your oblation and I admit you into union and affiliation with our
community, as oblates of our Holy Father Saint Benedict. I grant you the privilege of sharing in our
spiritual goods and I promise you eternal life if you persevere in your holy resolution.”
Our monastic profession is fulfilled by these words of Psalm 118:116 recited by all of us, religious or
secular - ‘Suscipe me Domine secundum eloquium tuum, et vivam, et ne confundas me ad
expectatione mea’; more accurately translated in the context of the Rule as ‘Receive me O Lord
according to your promise, and I shall live. Do not disappoint me in my hope’. The irrevocable
nature of this covenant oblation that we all make and ‘lay on the altar’ is treated in depth by Dom
Christophe Vuillaume in his article in Word and Spirit.
The Monastic Oblate
As a monk of Prinknash wrote in the 1930s, ‘The oblate though living in the world will carry into it
the peace of Benedictine inspiration, the spirit of poverty, chastity and obedience, of family love and
true friendship, of stability and respect for tradition and knowledge, and , most important of all, that
liturgical spirit, which not content with a bare observance of necessary duties, will endeavour, by
frequent or daily assistance at Mass and the reception of Holy Communion, familiarity with the
Divine Office and the Liturgy in general, to obey the command of Our Holy Father Saint Benedict.
‘To prefer nothing to the Work of God’’.
What else would I have said if my colleague had been prepared to engage in our conversation? I
might have referred him, in the best academic manner, to some of the recent literature on the subject;
such as the excellent paper by Mark Plaiss on Lay Monasticism. Plaiss, writing just before 9/11
observed ‘The Monk is in the Monastery. The Monk is in the World Trade Centre, on Main Street,
the Laundromat, and down at the farm.’ Apart from considering the nature or charism of Cistercian
monasticism and monk he gave much thought to adjectives such as Lay, Oblate, Secular, and
Associate. The term Associate, which apparently does not have the same marginal connotation in
American as it does in English, has apparently been adopted.
I would have added that although some monastics may be canonically religious and others secular,
they all share the same lay state. To talk about lay monasticism is strictly a tautology. St Benedict
was a layman and Benedictine monasticism qua monasticism is a lay vocation not a clerical one;
although for Roman Canon Law the more general state of the ‘consecrated life’ is neither clerical nor
lay per se, but can be either and does not change its status by joining either type of Institute.
Oblation is recognised as a canonical state (ie in Canon Law Canon 303). Of course monasticism is
not restricted to the particular institutional world view and terminology of Roman Catholicism.
The terms monk or nun are nowhere defined in Roman Canon law and do not even belong
exclusively to Christianity let alone Rome. Canonically a Roman Catholic can be a member of a
religious or a secular institute of consecrated life, a hermit, an anchorite or a consecrated virgin or
none of these.
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Whether the Institute itself is considered to be clerical or lay depends on whether its governance
requires the exercise of sacred orders. I definitely consider myself a monk but not a canonically
religious member of a particular institute, I see myself as a secular as distinct from religious
Benedictine monk, and a layman; who is also an Oblate member of Prinknash Abbey’ which is a
religious institute consisting of both clerical and non clerical, or lay, members. Some of us lay
brothers are canonically religious and some secular. (Canon 607). The term lay brother has gone but
the canonical distinction between them and clerical brothers has not.
Dom Bede Griffiths once observed, ‘An order of monastics is essentially a lay order. Some monks
may live in monasteries, but increasingly the majority will live in their own homes or in small
communities. This is rather like the Sufis who are also not priests. Often the Sufi is married and the
community gathers around the family. These are models we could easily follow and this is perhaps
the direction in which we are moving today’.
I could have pointed my colleague in the direction of ‘Benedict in the World - Portraits of Monastic
oblates’ which includes the story of Denys Prideaux, an oblate who finally found himself Abbot of
his Community. Traditionally, the Anglican Abbots of Elmore do not have to be clerics.
Plaiss is also very informative about similar Cistercian experiments which include part time or even
temporary monks, rather like the resident and habited oblates we still had in the 50s at Prinknash (not
to be confused with the lay brothers). We should not preclude the possibility of having such oblates
(conversi or lay brothers?) here again. I see in the UK Benedictine Yearbook, internal oblates are to
be found in Pluscarden and St Mary’s Petersham of our Congregation and in other Congregations of
our Order, totalling some 130 oblates worldwide.
The Carthusians also have Oblates; they call them Donates – full members of the Order but not in
formal vows. ‘..the Donates, who do not take vows, but for the love of Christ give themselves to the
Order [either temporarily or permanently] in a mutually binding pledge; since they lead a monastic
life, these too are called monks’. This is important, as the Carthusian Statutes recognise that it is the
oblation to the conversation which makes the monk rather than formal vows.
The religious and the secular oblate members, clerical or lay, of the Benedictine community both
make the same promise and the same oblation, as specified by the Rule, and join the same
community - for life. Both strictly speaking can live entirely in the monastery, both entirely outside,
or a combination of the two. Both, however, always fully participate to the best of their ability in the
conversation that is the monastic life.
Christ the Ideal of the Monk
However, in the light of my curtailed discussion at dinner, I would still like to explore exactly what
the words monk and nun mean in daily use? Of course, in the best traditions of Humpty Dumpty,
like any other word, they mean exactly what I want them to mean. This, as Lewis Carol intended us
to appreciate, is all they can mean, and is both the strength and the weakness of symbolic thinking
and words in particular. Why not just use them without bothering to define them and let people
make their own sense of what I say? Why try to be more explicit? Cui bono?
Perhaps it is my desire to clarify, to explicate, or even defend. During a discussion some time ago I
heard some fellow oblates observe that of course Sisters who taught in schools and worked in
hospitals or parishes were not real nuns. The remark implied that one could not be a real nun without
living a particular (unspecified) type of institutional life.
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The terms monk or nun are not actually defined in Canon Law. Only incidentally are they used to
refer to someone belonging to a religious community but there is no suggestion that this is an
exclusive use. (Canon 613 et al). How exactly they belong is also not specified. St Benedict defines
a coenobitical monk as a person based in a monastery and studying the service of the Lord while
under the rule of an Abbot. An eremitical monk is well trained in school of the Lord’s service before
leaving his community and going into single combat in the desert.
The concept of the monk has a complicated history; it comes from the Greek - monos – one, unique
and alone (which indeed we all are) but also implies internal unity of our true self with God (to
which we all aspire). For St Augustine the Community was the Unity. The ‘habitare fratres in Unum’
of Psalm 132 was the corporate manifestation of the good and cheerful (quam bonum et quam
jocundum) monk. This idea that ‘the community is the monk’ was an early version of Mead’s social
object. Later this unity was seen as a personal interior unity or divinisation, realising in our true self
the unity of God. As the 12th Century Cistercian Geoffrey of Auxerre observed, this interior personal
unity has to precede any comm-unity. However, the Rule specifically envisages monasticism to be a
social way of life to be lived by individuals in association with others – a conversation. It is either a
Cœnobitical conversation or an eremitical one. Dom Luc Brésard’s treatment of the word Monk is
particularly rewarding to read in his article in the Scourmont Studium.
When St Basil says in his Rule ‘Man is not a monastic animal’, he was referring to the eremitical
life. That is, man, in his opinion, was not made to live alone. To aspire to be a monk is an
ontological statement about becoming truly oneself as part of a conversation. To become oneself is a
matter of intention (desire) and not of any specific action. It is a movement of love towards God in
the company of one’s brethren that is never completed in this life. I have elsewhere described this
group process of becoming as an aesthetic experience. Any word inevitably means different things to
each unique participant of a relationship according to their own gifts, insights, imagination and life
experiences. There are necessarily as many ideas of what a monk is as there are monks and of course
as many ideas as to what an oblate is as there are oblates.
The Monastic Institution
Just as in the workplace we can distinguish between the bricks and mortar of the institution, and the
organisation that is manifested in the conversation of its workers, so we can similarly distinguish
between the walls of the monastic institution and the conversation that is the monastic way of life
manifested by its monks.
The old phrase ‘the habit does not make the monk’, by which was meant that it is the oblation and
not any physical clothing that is of the essence, can be extended to mean that just to adopt a
particular institutional way of life does not make the monk either. Nevertheless the institution, the
walls and the habits, (both clothing and daily routine) all have their part to play. The school of the
Lord’s service has to have a base somewhere. The concept of Place is central to the monastic
tradition. The ‘genius loci’ is the soul of stability.
The institutional accidentals of monasticism are however variable, negotiable and can be and have
been experimented with; and they undoubtedly influence the quality of the conversation. Oblate
communities have been tried with very mixed success. Fr John Main’s short lived Oblate
Community in Montreal, to which my mother transferred her Oblation from Prinknash in the 80s,
had some members such as Br. Wayne Teasdale who famously referred to himself as a ‘monk in the
world’ and later became a consecrated hermit just before his death.
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There are of course numerous institutional differences between the internal and the external modes of
participating in the monastic conversation but none, I suggest, of any radical significance in the light
of eternity. To say that a particular institutional way of life is the only way to be a monk (other than
living in the spirit of the Rule) comes from the same stable as Augustus Welby Pugin’s insistence that
church architecture had to be Pointed to be Christian. [Although who am I to accuse anyone of
Victorian gothic monasticism, with my penchant for the Latin Office of Farnborough’s Monastic
Diurnal?] Of course institutions are necessary although not sufficient, conditions for the living of the
monastic conversation. As I say, we all have to live somewhere and at times meet together
somewhere.
These institutional differences can tend to obscure the fundamental similarities of the monastic
conversation, which may lead us to believe we cannot share them. The external brother might, on the
one hand, envy the life of the apparently leisured country gentleman with few worries and fewer
responsibilities, as our quondam Oblate Master, Abbot Aldhelm Cameron-Brown, once put it, as
opposed to ‘us at the coal face, with millstone sized mortgages and ever demanding domestic
responsibilities round our necks’. On the other hand the enclosed religious brother might feel that the
ascetic and sometimes lonely demands of the communal bachelor life are a sacrifice in distinct
contrast to the apparent domestic joys of career, marriage or parenthood. On a personal note, having
happily experienced both, and without idealising either, I would say the institutional differences are
largely imagined. The underlying identity of purpose of the conversation, which is all about finding
God in Christ through Love in conversation , can be both concealed and revealed by the mundane
details of our daily lives in any context.
This fraternal life, communion or conversation is not dependant upon and extends beyond the
confines of the life in common – cloister or domestic hearth. The Cambridge University monastic
historian, Dom David Knowles, following Geoffrey of Auxerre, sums it up very well while
reminding us of the importance of a sound monastic formation for all us Benedictines, religious or
secular. ‘Neither habit nor choir nor community life are essential to sanctity and a life of prayer. If
the end of monastic observance, the monasticism of the soul, be once attained, it may be retained no
matter where one is. The monk and the contemplative, like Plato’s guardians, may come back to the
world they have left and be able to work in it and for it.’ Many of the monks of Douai Abbey who
were sent out to run parishes never returned to the Abbey, even on retirement decades later.
The Counsels of Perfection and Monasticism
To return to my academic colleague’s observation about the vows, and to give him his due: He
would have readily agreed that it is the conversation that forms or transforms us in the context of the
organisational life of the academic workplace and vice versa, but it is clearly not, in his view, true for
me, in the context of the life of the monastic workplace or school of the Lord’s service.
Why not? He was possibly confusing the essential character of the monastic conversation with the
evangelical counsels of perfection: Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. He was particularly exercised
by Chastity, confusing it, I suspect, with Celibacy.
It is true that since the 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law there has been a requirement for all
new members of Religious Institutes (not Secular Institutes such as Opus Dei which although not
Benedictine could be said to follow a monastic way of life without taking any vows) to profess
formally the evangelical counsels of perfection of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. This formal
profession is of course not necessary for the monastic life per se. Most monks and nuns alive today
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have never formally made such vows and never will. ‘Other sacred bonds in accordance with the
laws of their institutes’ which implicitly profess them are quite acceptable instead. (Canon 573.2).
This profession of the counsels of perfection, either implicitly or explicitly, is now required as a
discipline to promote a specific sign. As the Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium #44 put it:
‘The profession of the evangelical counsels ……appears as a sign which can and ought to attract all
members of the church to an effective and prompt fulfilment of their Christian Vocation. The People
of God has no lasting City here below. This being so, the religious state, by giving its members
greater freedom from earthly cares, more adequately manifests to all believers the presence of the
heavenly goods already possessed here below.’
In other words the actual public profession is a well intentioned publicity exercise. The
manifestation of the evangelical counsels should be more apparent in the religious life and their
formal declaration in the context of an Institute of Consecrated Life would be seen as a good
example for all members of the Church. The actual following of the counsels themselves is however,
in one way or another, incumbent on all members of the Church, and all those seeking Christian
Perfection should ideally profess them in a traditional form. Unless, that is, they can think of
something better. See Karl Rahner on the Evangelical Counsels in his Concise Theological
Dictionary.
The further distinction made by Robert E Rhodes Jnr. in his thought provoking paper ‘On the
Vocation of the Benedictine Oblate’ that somehow only the spirit of the counsels is lived in what he
refers to as the lay state, while the spirit and the specific practices are to be found in the religious or
clerical states must be open to question. He proposes two parallel universes, as it were, I would
rather propose that both the spirit and the specific practices of the counsels, in as much as they can be
distinguished usefully, which I doubt, are to be found in all states of life. Indeed we should expect to
find them in all states. To attempt to reserve the actual following of the counsels of perfection to one
particular state of life might be to question whether Christian perfection is open to all – clearly an
untenable position, as we are all called to be saints. If you sell all you own, someone has to buy it!
The specifically religious versions of the councils of perfection are dispensable when required by
circumstance but their secular versions are not and apply to all.
Poverty
Poverty, specifically, is to commit one’s current and future personal possessions, wealth and earnings
to the benefit of the wider commonweal, family or community; receiving back, ‘ad usum meum’,
‘for my use’, only what is appropriate in the circumstances. This applies to everybody, living alone,
in family or in community. ‘With my goods I thee endow’. ‘From each according to….to each
according to…’ etc.
For Dominicans private wealth, sometimes great wealth, was retained outside the Order and was
common until generally discouraged in the 1920s. Fr. Bede Jarrett OP was greatly scandalised by
Pére Lacordaire meeting him at the Railway Station in Paris in his personal coach and four, escorted
by six footmen running alongside. This particular take on evangelical poverty was due to the political
and social uncertainties of the religious life in late 19th Century Europe, France in particular. In my
time, some 50 years ago, one of my Dominican brethren, was (for allegedly unavoidable legal
reasons) found to be, on his death, the proud owner of a famous gin distillery and brewery. Autres
temps, autres moeurs. One of our tasks should be to ascertain what customs (‘morum nostrorum’)
are appropriate for our times.
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Poverty is effectively abandoned for monks who work on their own in parishes, universities and so
on; and formally for those who become bishops or above.
Chastity
‘Chastity’, as Timothy Radcliffe OP observes, ‘is a rather unfashionable virtue. It sounds prim and
prissy. It is however a virtue we are all called to whether we are married, single or have made
religious vows.’ He asks ‘How can we live happily with the powerful urge of the erotic whether as
married, single or celibate people?’ ‘However much one might love another person, they can never
be everything that one seeks. No person can offer that complete satisfaction, that stilling of all
desire. We are Capax Dei – made for God - and as Augustine wrote “Our hearts find no peace until
they rest in you”. And on the pilgrim way we need not just the one we love most, but other friends
and family, a sustaining web of relationships. We all remain in some sense solitary, unfulfilled, until
we arrive in the Kingdom.’
He goes on: ‘Rilke understood that there could be no true intimacy between a couple until one
realises that everyone remains, in a way, alone. Every human being retains solitude, a space around
them that cannot be abolished. ‘A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other the guardian
of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow…. Once the
realisation is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to
exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between
them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky’.
Canon Law more prosaically insists that each religious institute is free to and must define in its
constitutions exactly how the counsels are to be observed (Canon 598). For Chastity to be
recognised canonically it must involve the perfect continence observed in celibacy. It is a particular
form of fidelity. Thus ‘chastity embraced for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven…as a source of
greater fruitfulness in an undivided heart’ is necessarily celibate, (Canon 599).
Chastity is also celibate for anyone who is not married, in which case it must also of course be
continent. Continent celibacy is required of all who are not married, not just religious men and
women. Chastity in marriage is also a form of renunciation, ‘and forsaking all others’. I am told that
St Therese of Lisieux’s parents initially took a private vow of married continent chastity until
fortunately persuaded to abandon it! Monastic chastity is also dispensable upon application to the
appropriate authority but secular chastity is not.
Obedience
Obedience is the simplest and the most difficult counsel of perfection. It is the one the misuse of
which has unfortunately corrupted many a monastic community. At its best is the gift of attentive,
receptive and appreciative listening to the other in the appropriate context of the conversation. (obaudire -to listen carefully) and appropriately responding wholeheartedly and immediately. Without
attentive listening there can be no conversation. ‘Obsculta o fili’ to the master’s instructions and
attend to them with the ear of one’s heart is a prerequisite for both monastic obœdientia and the
marital ‘I promise to obey’. Seeking the Will of God, in attentive obedience, through Christ, and his
surrogates such as our superiors, our brothers and sisters, our guests, our spouses, our children or our
employees etc. is at the heart of our monastic conversation
As the Rule requires, our obedience should be prompt and willing. We should set aside ‘voluntatem
propriam’ which as Abbot Bamberger points out, does not mean ‘ones own free will’ but ‘self will’ or
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‘ones own wilfulness’. We cannot obey meaningfully without doing so willingly, and without doing
so intelligently. For brethren elevated to the episcopacy, monastic obedience is cancelled and
transferred to the Pope; marital obedience cannot be transferred.
Conclusion
What practical differences do canonical distinctions between us make to the quality of our
participation in the monastic conversation? There are many possible distinctions which are all to be
respected; some of us are canonically religious, some are canonically secular; some of us are celibate
clerics either Catholic or Anglican, some are married clerics (ex Anglican Catholic or Anglican),
some abbots and some bishops. Some of us become cardinals, even Pope; but nevertheless we all
also belong to our monastic conversation. Dom Basil Hume only accepted his Red Hat on the
understanding that he could continue to wear the habit of his Benedictine conversation
I am again reminded of a distinction from my own experience between full time Regular Army
Officers and part time Territorial Reservists. The former do not readily acknowledge the latter as
real soldiers as they do not ‘belong’ to the Colours; and the latter see the former as still busily
fighting the last war but one; in their archaic ceremonial dress uniforms. The distinctions as quickly
disappear in the Humvees and Chinooks of the battlefield as they do in the workshops and choir
stalls of the monastery. (RB Prol. 40 et al.)
The real meaning of our monastic covenant is not a canonical matter at all; it is about something else
entirely. It is about our monastic personality (the monasticism of our soul), a social construct or
social object, specific not to each of us separately or to any particular time or place or condition, but
to us all as members of a particular monastic conversation. I commit myself permanently to this
conversation. I am privileged to participate in this particular conversation which prefigures and
prepares me for that final conversation which is in Heaven. Each occasion of the death and burial of
a member of our community reminds me that this is the whole point of it.
Finally, in the light of the above, how can I usefully and more accurately define an oblate? I could,
following Brother Tvedten, Fr Laurence Freeman and others, use the popular and all-embracing
American term ‘monastic’ but I am uncomfortable with being an adjective. I could, for convenience,
drop any qualifier for the word Benedictine other than the name of the community, the membership
of which makes me one. That is ‘A Benedictine of Prinknash’, leaving it up to me to furnish
anything more specific as and when required. This would conversationally cover my sister oblates to
whom of course all this also applies. It is now generally accepted that oblates are genuine
‘Benedictines’. cf Pluscarden’s Oblate Statutes. I could live with this. I could go with Dom John
Main’s ‘Monastery without Walls’, or even perhaps ‘Moines sans Frontiers’ However, I am happier
with the more technically accurate and grammatically more comfortable term ‘secular monk’.
Of course, if anyone does not approve of any of these descriptions then let them devise some other,
so long as we all recite the psalms weekly.
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Christopher K. Rance OSB (Obl.Pk)
w/c 6614 (incl bibl 419) rev 03/06/14
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