This morning was cold and grey, but thankfully not raining. I woke up at 8 am (such a luxury) and we set off for a walk to the monastery at 10:15 am, arriving there at 10:30. Unfortunately, according to our guide Brother Kuno, we were fifteen minutes late. Apparently we were supposed to arrive at 10:15. (How Swiss!)
In any event Brother Kuno was very gracious, and he took us on a tour of the church, the library and talked about his monastery. When he started there in 1980, there were about eighty monks. Now they are down to 14. The monks are supposed to care for each other until death. If Brother Kuno started there in 1980, that suggests he was born in the 1950s, which means that he is around 70. I wonder what is going to happen to him and the other old-timers.
This is a Benedictine monastery, founded in 1120. It is the only one in a large area that encompasses all of Switzerland and parts of France and Germany that was not suppressed by Napoleon’s army. Hidden in the mountains as they are, they somehow managed to survive.
However, in 1870, there was a crisis. For reasons that he didn’t explain (but which must have had something to do with the Franco-Prussian war) the abbott of the time was so scared that this monastery of Engelberg would be suppressed, that he sent twelve monks to the United States. But, the monks couldn’t agree on where to found the new monastery. One group founded Conception Abbey in Conception, Missouri. Another group traveled further westwards to Oregon to found Mount Angel Abbey (the English translation of Engelberg.)
In any event, the mother church in Engelberg was not suppressed. But how interesting that that 19th-century abbott thought of the United States when his religion and his monastery were in danger of being wiped out!
