RELIGIOUS LIFE
Breathing life into sacred stones Text by Carol Schuck Scheiber Photos courtesy of the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux
THE MONKS (above) celebrate the completion of the ceiling of their restored monastery building. THOUSANDS OF GUESTS visit the abbey each year to see the reconstructed building (facing page).
A community of Trappist monks in California have a unique relationship with a monastery that is an ocean of water—and time—away.
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Carol Schuck Scheiber is content editor of the VISION Vocation Guide.
62 | VISION 2015 | VocationNetwork.org
HE TRAPPIST MONKS of the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux in Vina, California have a story that parallels the Christian story of death and resurrection: They helped resurrect, in a way, a shuttered Trappist monastery founded in northeastern Spain in 1181. That monastery maintained for 654 years the simple life of prayer and work that Trappist monks around the world have adhered to for nearly a millennium. In 1835 the Spanish government dissolved the Ovila, Spain monastery, giving the land and church buildings to private owners. Fast forward to 1931: The rich and prominent publisher William Randolph Hearst became enchanted with Gothic architecture while touring Europe. He spent part of his fortune purchasing the stones of the monastery of Ovila and moving them to California to use in a castle he hoped to build. The Great Depression, however, caught up with Hearst, and the project was abandoned. The stones sat for decades among weeds in a San Francisco park. Then, many years after the Spanish monastery had been dismantled,
