Search the Episcopal Press and News

Episcopalians, Benedictines Agree To Develop Faith Center

Episcopal News Service. November 17, 1983 [83212]

COLLEGEVILLE, Minn. (DPS, Nov. 17) -- The Benedictine community of St. John's Abbey here and the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota have become partners in a venture that grows directly from the common understandings of Roman Catholic/Anglican dialogues. The Community has invited the diocese to establish a spirituality center on the grounds of the abbey and university.

Anticipating the invitation, the Minnesota Episcopal diocese had already begun raising money to finance such a center, which will be located on a five-acre site to be rented from the monks for $1.00 on a 75-year renewable lease.

Both Episcopal and Roman Catholic leaders said the center is expected to have international implications. They noted the existence of centuries-old ties between the Benedictines and the Anglican Communion. Benedictines started the See of Canterbury, the spiritual center of Anglicanism, and built Westminster Abbey, a leading Anglican shrine.

The diocese said the new center "will provide an environment for development of personal and corporate spirituality through individual retreats, guest days, vestry conferences, and so forth." It said the center program would be "unique" because of the resources available from St. John's and from the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, which is also located on the college campus.

The center will serve Episcopalians in Minnesota and other dioceses in the church's Sixth Province, as well as Christians from other denominations.

In their formal invitation, approved overwhelmingly in a chapter meeting, the Benedictine community -- the world's largest -- quoted a final report by the joint Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission. That report said some of the remaining difficulties between the two traditions "still not be wholly resolved until a practical initiative has been taken and our two churches have lived together more visibly in the one koinonia (fellowship) ...

"As one of the practical initiatives for growing together, we, the monastic community of St. Johns Abbey, invite the Episcopalians of Minnesota to establish a center of spirituality on the grounds of St. Jon's Abbey and University"

"We acknowledge in the Anglican tradition a comprehensiveness of faith and practice which the Episcopalians could share with the monastic and university communities by their presence here."

As their contributions, the invitations continued, Benedictines could offer "the witness of the common life, the monastic community as 'a school of the Lord's service' with its emphasis on liturgical praise, an ordered prayer life, lectio divina (Divine Office), and the brotherhood as a covenant body of mutually supporting services.

"Part of the monastic tradition has been a way of serving the church and the world by an unscheduled openness, by being a sign of the kingdom, present and active, and by gathering all that is worthy into the praise of the Father.

"Monastic spirituality grows out of long tradition understood as a living experience. This we consider a strength. Benedictines' monasticism, very much tied to their particularity of time and place, would be untrue to tradition so understood if it simply looked back to the liturgical and theological glories of the past, if it were not open to new modes of spiritual expression, new styles of appropriating the enduring reality of life in God...

"In so far as our true tradition makes possible and time allows, we extend to the Episcopalians, as we have to others, the opportunity to participate in our monastic hours of prayer.

"Finally, we want to share St. Benedict's purifying and relentless norm of authentic monastic life, namely, that through and in community each person seeks God."

Liaison for the center project has been a Church of England priest from Canterbury, the Rev. Nicholas Darby, who for several months was personal aide to the Rt. Rev. William Dimmick, an assistant bishop of the Minnesota Diocese when he was stationed at St. John's.

Intrigued with the project and what it symbolizes for the larger Anglican Communion, Darby returned to St. John's, where he celebrates the Eucharist weekly for Episcopalians in the St. Augustine of Canterbury Chapel, which the monks rent to him. He also serves as a faculty resident in a St. John's dormitory and assists in the university's Christian humanism project.

Dr. William Franklin, an Episcopalian who is a history professor at St. John's and also heavily involved in the project, said he sees the center as a visible Christian unity at a time when many though that ecumenism was dying.

He said there is a "real kinship of the spirit" between Episcopalians and Benedictines that is not true for some other segments of the Catholic Church.

Franklin is secretary of the standing commission on ecumenical relations of the national Episcopal Church and a member of the Episcopal delegation to the Anglican/Roman Catholic Consultation in the United States.

[thumbnail: St. John's Chapel] [thumbnail: The Rev. Mr. Darby] [thumbnail: Dr. Franklin]