On this day 100 years ago, a group of Benedictine monks woke up to survey their new home, a cocoa plantation that overlooked Tunapuna in east Trinidad. Photos of their earliest habitation show a rough cottage made of wood and branches, the "tapia hut," as they called it.
Today, the Abbey of Our Lady of Exile at Mount St Benedict has become one of Trinidad and Tobago's sacred places. There are several sturdy, well-kept buildings on the property, including the church, a convent and a seminary. The order that oversees the Mount and its ministries are Roman Catholic, but people from several faiths go there to pray, get counsel from the monks, or just to find a place of peace away from the constant whirl of life.
"When Mount St Benedict started, this place was barren. There were no houses or institutions. It was a set of bush. When the monks came here, from the very first day, people of all classes, races, religions and sizes would follow the monks," said John Pereira, abbot at the Mount.
"There are very early reports of large pilgrimages of indentured East Indians walking up the hill to speak with the monks, and one of the monks was commissioned to learn Hindi so that he could communicate the gospel with these people."
The idea of Mount St Benedict as a place of escape is apt, since the abbey was first founded as a place of refuge for Benedictine monks at the Abbey of Bahia in Brazil. During the early 20th century, the Brazilian government was deeply opposed to the power and influence of the Roman Catholic clergy and tried to diminish that power in several ways, including confiscating church property, Pereira said.
According to a history of the Mount called the Abbey Mount St Benedict, the Abbott of the Bahia abbey, Dom Mayeul de Caigny, searched for and established the refuge he was looking for in Tunapuna, purchasing the property from Andrew Gomez and quickly building a home for Benedictine monks nestled into the Northern Range.
Now the chapel and grounds are open to the public seven days a week, with the devout lighting candles and praying in front of the sacred image of Our Lady of Exile, or just sitting on benches that overlook panoramic vista of the East-West corridor and central Trinidad.
From inception in 1912 to today, the abbey has weathered much-the vast expansion of its own physical structure, political and social upheavals and 50 years of T&T's independence. Yesterday, the monks celebrated their 100th anniversary with a special mass. Today they launch a commemorative DVD to doubly honour this historical moment.
Pax in Virtute (peace in virtue) is emblazoned above one of the arches on the church at the Mount, and peace is very integral to what the Benedictine monks are doing in this place, Pereira said. "The ultimate aim of a Benedictine monk is one who strives for [spiritual] peace and pursues it, and one who seeks to share that peace with others. So Mount St Benedict has come to be known as a place of peace," he explained.
The monks spend time in solitude and prayer, seeking to get closer to God by these methods. But for all their closeness with God, both in proximity and spirituality, some may argue that by pulling away out of "real life," monks do more harm than good. Why aren't they ministering directly among the people who need them most?
Pereira does not shy away from the criticism. In fact he says monks are meant to pull away from society, as St Benedict did when he became disillusioned by the hedonistic world view of his own Roman peers in the sixth century AD. Pereira himself has had a fascinating personal history:he had been working at Carib Brewery for 11 years as an accountant when he began to feel there was more to life than making beer and money.
"The fact that we are running away does not mean that we are not in touch with society. The monk is the man who gets away so that he can look at life and at the world from a different perspective and get a broader image, so that when people come to us who are just seeing their little world-'You know, my husband beating me,'-we are able to give a broader perspective because we're not in the melee. We are not forsaking the world, we are running away for the sake of the world."
Pereira admits that the RC Church has been shrinking globally. Over the last ten years, scandal over child molestation by priests and cover-ups of the abuse by the administration has damaged the church's credibility and influence worldwide. The faithful are ageing, and the youngest monk at Mount St Benedict is in his mid-thirties. One hundred years ago, it was not uncommon to have several young men in their late teens become novitiates.
Because the Mount belongs to a wider congregation of Benedictine abbeys, the need for new monks is not yet desperate. But the number of local vocations is very low, the abbot said, owing to a number of factors, among them shrinking family sizes, a ravening sexualised culture and the decrease of the church's influence in areas like education.
Monastic life is not peculiar to Roman Catholicism and people have always and will always feel the need to pull away from their society in order to draw closer to God, Pereira said. But he acknowledges that the Mount, and the church as a whole, may need to reintroduce the concepts of living for spirituality instead of self to a new generation that has not yet been taught an higher purpose than the search for money and pleasure.
"The ideal is that people would grow to an appreciation of the value of a life like this. One idea might be to visit schools from time to time and expose this as another option for a young man at the age of 18, 19, thinking what is he going to do with the rest of his life. This is also a valid option, and if somebody is willing, the opportunity is there. So as a church, we need to be a little bit more like Jesus and invite people to follow us," he said.