A New French Abbey: Tradition’s Enduring Appeal

The Europe that the monk Raoul Glaber saw with pride at the dawn of the year 1000, covered with “a white mantle of churches,” has entered a dark era of de-Christianisation. Church towers gave way to minarets, and city churches, gradually falling into disuse, were at best converted into trendy bars or contemporary art exhibition halls—when they were not destroyed once and for all. And what of the monasteries, those spacious buildings that once housed cohorts of monks whose prayers, recited from dawn to dusk, set the rhythm of the days and seasons in the countryside?

Today, many of them are real estate complexes that have become useless. The monks are ageing and are going to end their days in medical care facilities that have only a very distant relationship with stained glass windows and ribbed vaults.

And yet, there are still communities in France that continue to speak to young people and are capable not only of erecting walls and building new monasteries, but also of restoring ancient walls threatened with abandonment.

Like the Major Ecclesia of old, the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, these communities are spreading. Their pews are full, and they can even afford the luxury of founding ‘daughters,’ as they are called in monastic language.

The common thread among these abbeys is that they have chosen to remain faithful to the pre-conciliar liturgical tradition. Mass is celebrated according to the rite of St. Pius V, which was in force before the reforms implemented by the Second Vatican Council.

The Burgundian Abbey of Saint Joseph de Clairval gave birth to the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Solignac. The Abbey of Fontgombault already has five foundations: Randol in Auvergne, Triors in Provence, Donezan in the Pyrenees, Wisques in northern France, and even Clear Creek in Oklahoma in the United States.

The Abbey of Le Barroux, a spiritual beacon for many conservatives and friends of Tradition throughout the world, has already spread for the first time to the monastery of Notre-Dame de La Garde. It is preparing to take over a new abbey threatened with abandonment, the Trappist monastery of Bellefontaine in Anjou.

Thirteen Trappist monks still reside there, with an average age of over eighty. Despite all their good will, they are no longer able to maintain the imposing building. The monastery, originally Benedictine, was founded in 1120. The current Trappist community has been there since 1816, but its existence is coming to an end, having failed to attract new vocations. The monks had devised an alternative solution of ‘monastic cohabitation’ with a migrant reception centre, but the project was not viable and could not be realised.

The Provençal Abbey of Le Barroux expressed interest in taking over Bellefontaine, much to the surprise of the Trappists, who were initially hesitant to trust a community known for its attachment to traditional liturgy. This particular kind of rebellion is considered suspicious. The bishop is sympathetic to the idea. The Barroux’s loyalty to Rome finally won them over: twelve monks from the Barroux will therefore move there in the spring of 2026. “Perhaps this responds to an expectation in an increasingly secularised world,” Brother Samuel, one of the last representatives of the original community, is forced to admit.

Indeed, this “expectation” is not a myth and largely explains the success of these monastic communities, which are now virtually the only ones recruiting new members. Through their attachment to beauty and a sense of the sacred, they compensate for the loss of meaning in the modern world. The living tradition is attractive, even to young people. At Le Barroux, the youngest monk is twenty years old.

While the news of the arrival of the Benedictines of Le Barroux in Bellefontaine was generally greeted with relief and even joy, insofar as it guarantees that the abbey will not be abandoned, an underlying mistrust persists among some representatives of the ecclesiastical hierarchy—and even among some monks. The appeal of traditional communities is a cause for concern, as if it might lead to a kind of ‘conservative revolution’ within the Church. In 2021, in Burgundy, the local bishop preferred to allow a luxury hotel to be built in the ancient Cistercian abbey of Pontigny—the largest Cistercian abbey in the world still standing—rather than open its doors to a traditional seminary of the Fraternity of Saint Peter, which was ready to take over the premises. We must hope that this type of reluctance will finally give way, as in Bellefontaine, to hope and common sense.