The Monastery (History tidbits)

Monastery, Antigonish County Swamped by the wave of Republican tyranny after the French Revolution, and refusing to pledge allegiance to any power other than Rome, Trappist monks fled to the New World, first arriving in North America in 1802. After a series of setbacks in the U.S., and stranded in Halifax with only the clothes on his back and a guinea in his hand, Father Vincent de Paul Merle and a few French Trappist monks founded Petit Clairvaux in 1825. It was located in Monastery, Antigonish County, about 30 kilometres east of present day Antigonish. It was to be the first Trappist monastery in North America.

After endeavouring for many years to increase the number of monks at the monastery, Father Vincent died in 1853, never to see his hopes realized. His work was not in vain however, and a large group of monks arrived in 1857-1858. With such good fortune, the membership grew, and the monastery was raised to the status of an independent abbey in 1876. Tragically, fire struck in the late 1890s and the community was forced to move to Rhode Island, and then on to Massachusetts.

 The monastery was vacant until 1903-1904, when it was once again occupied by a group of French Trappist brothers. Trappists are an Order that do not engage in activities within the community at large. Hence they settle in somewhat remote places where they give themselves to an intense life of prayer and penance. For their support as well as part of their religious discipline, they engage in farming and other manual labour as the situation may demand. In Monastery, they built a sawmill and a gristmill, a dam on their property, and installed a water turbine in the brook. They also farmed the land and kept dairy and beef cattle, sheep, pigs and horses.

 Called to military service in France during the First World War, most of the members of this community dispersed and the monastery seemed doomed to be abandoned.

 In 1938, a group of German Augustinians took over the site to escape Hitler’s persecution of religious orders. The monastery was renamed St. Augustine's Monastery, and the buildings were rebuilt and modernized. Farming resumed, as did the use of the sawmill. The west wing of the monastery was converted into a retreat house for the benefit of lay people and clergy of all denominations.

 From 1954 to 1964 Good Counsel Academy, a boarding school for boys, was operated and a large chapel and gymnasium were built. The Augustine monks engaged in much educational, social, and charitable work in the community.

 During the Jubilee Year of the millennium, the Maronite Monks of the Most Holy Trinity founded a new monastery in Nova Scotia- Our Lady of Grace Monastery. This Order was originally founded in 1978, and was situated in a very quiet part of central Massachusetts, where the monks lived a life of silence, solitude, liturgical prayer, and work.. The monks in Monastery live the same life as their fellow monks in Massachusetts and keep in close contact as members of the same religious family.

 "Hidden from the world, as it were, these cloistered monks live in the Heart of Christ and the Church, and thus in the heart of every person… Though in some cases they have no direct relations with their contemporaries, still in a deeper way they have their fellow men present with them in the Heart of Christ and cooperate with them spiritually, so that the building up of human society may always have its foundation in the Lord and have Him as its goal: otherwise those who build it may have laboured in vain"

 For almost two centuries now, in their silent contemplative work, monks have tilled the very spirit of holiness into the soil of Monastery. Our Lady of Grace Monastery continues the holy work started in this place, leading lives of sanctity in service to God.