Trappist Monks and Nuns Revive Interest in Monastic Vocations Online

From Catholic Online

By Alison Roncin

For more than nine centuries, Trappist monks and nuns have witnessed to the gospel of Jesus Christ through a cloistered, communal life wholly ordered to contemplation. Cistercians of the Strict Observance, also known as "Trappists" are an order of the Roman Catholic Church who founded their first monastery in the U.S. in 1848.

Cistercian presence in the U.S. has since expanded to include 17 monasteries across the nation. Yet recently, monastic membership has drastically decreased-50 percent since the 1940s-leading those 17 communities to explore more modernized means of fostering new membership.

Conversation with a Benedictine Monk

This is a fascinating interview with Brother Giles Conacher, OSB, Prior of Pluscarden Abbey in Moray, Scotland.  Pluscarden is a Benedictine monastery and the only medieval monastery in Britain still inhabited by monks that is used for its original purpose.

The conversation provides an insight into the life of a monk, the Benedictine charism,  monasticism, and Conacher's thoughts about early Christianity, technology, time, clocks and western thought.  The interview was conducted by Alan Macfarlane, who taught in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropological Science and a Life Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.