Conversations in the Abbey: Senior Monks of Saint Meinrad Reflect on their Lives (review)

In Conversations in the Abbey, Ruth Clifford Engs documents the lives of eleven senior Benedictine monks of St. Meinrad Abbey in St. Meinrad, Indiana. Using the monks' responses to her directed interview questions, Engs paints a rich and vivid picture of not only the last sixty years of the monastery but also the early and varied lives of some of the monks who shaped those years. The book is divided into two sections: The first part is composed of the oral histories of eleven monks. The second is an overview of the economic enterprises of the monastery based on both written documents from the monastery archive and interviews with the monks.

Conversations in the Abbey was a project originated by Edward L. Shaughnessy, who at one time had been a seminarian at St. Meinrad College. The purpose of the project was to record the personal memories of individual monks who had lived through the twentieth century and the incredible changes they witnessed both in the Catholic Church and in the secular society of the U.S. After Shaughnessy's death in 2005, the Abbot gave Engs permission to continue with the work. She used audiotapes to record the answers each monk gave to the same set of questions, which addressed events, concerns, and conditions marking different periods in their lives as monks of St. Meinrad Abbey. The questions were appropriately designed to elicit information about change and how it affected the monks. Engs transcribed and edited the taped interviews, nicely supplemented with essays written by some of the monks, which the author also edited for consistency with the formal interview questions and project purpose. The original audiotapes, transcriptions, essays written by the monks, and all other related materials to this work can be found in the St. Meinrad Abbey Archive.

Through her interviews with the monks, Engs records a rich and exciting part of the history of St. Meinrad that took place during a time of great change in both the Catholic Church and the country. Whereas the U.S. was going through the civil rights movement, the Catholic Church was reexamining its practices and structure. These movements overlapped in its effects on Catholic and American ways of life, allowing a framework that changed forever the way of life of the Benedictine monk.

One of the monks Engs interviewed was Fr. Cyprian Davis, OSB. Fr. Cyprian was born to an African American Protestant family in 1930. Reported by Engs, Cyprian's oral history gives the reader a picture of the discipline, strength of will, and intelligence that was required for a black man to pursue the vocation of monastic life during this time. Through her well-crafted questions, and his thoughtful responses, we are moved through racial segregation in the schools, uncertainty of being accepted in a predominantly white institution, acceptance, earning his doctorate, and being asked by his brother monks to take part in the march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

Another monk grew up on a Native American reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota. The son of a French Canadian father and Chippewa and French mother, and educated in mission schools, the possibility of Br. Jerome becoming a monk in a Midwestern Benedictine monastery would have seemed remote at best. However, told in his own words, his story demonstrates the strength and reality of what monastics refer to as their call, not only to monastic life but also to a particular monastery.

These are only two examples of the range of diversity of the men between the ages of 76 and 106 interviewed by Engs. Recording their life stories is not only important to the historical record of St. Meinrad but also to the ethnographic anthropological history of the last half of twentieth-century America as well. Their recorded lives leave a lasting record of men who lived life to the fullest in work, prayer, and social and cultural change...