The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, and Other Kentucky Articles

by James Lane Allen

A wonderful spectacle to the less fervid Benedictines of the closing seventeenth century must have seemed the work of De Rancé in that old Norman abbey! A strange company of human souls, attracted by the former distinction of the great abbot as well as by the peculiar vows of the institute, must have come together in its silent halls! One hears many stories, in the lighter vein, regarding some of its inmates. Thus, there was a certain furious ex-trooper, lately reeking with blood, who got himself much commended by living on baked apples; and a young nobleman who devoted himself to the work of washing daily the monastery spittoons. One Brother, the story runs, having one day said there was too much salt in his scalding-hot broth, immediately burst into tears of contrition for his wickedness in complaining; and another went for so many years without raising his eyes that he knew not a new chapel had been built, and so quite cracked his skull one day against the wall of it.

The abbey was an asylum for the poor and helpless, [175] the shipwrecked, the conscience-stricken, and the broken-hearted—for that meditative type of fervid piety which for ages has looked upon the cloister as the true earthly paradise wherein to rear the difficult edifice of the soul's salvation. Much noble blood sought De Rancé's retreat to wash out its terrifying stains, and more than one reckless spirit went thither to take upon itself the yoke of purer, sweeter usages.

De Rancé's work remains an influence in the world. His monastery and his reform constitute the true background of material and spiritual fact against which to outline the present Abbey of La Trappe in Kentucky. Even when thus viewed, it seems placed where it is only by some freak of history. An abbey of La Trappe in Kentucky! How inharmonious with every element of its environment appears this fragment of old French monastic life! It is the twelfth century touching the last of the nineteenth—the Old World reappearing in the New. Here are French faces—here is the French tongue. Here is the identical white cowl presented to blessed St. Alberick in the forests of Burgundy nine hundred years ago. Here is the rule of St. Benedict, patriarch of the Western monks in the sixth century. When one is put out at the way-side station, amid woodlands and fields of Indian-corn, and, leaving the world behind him, turns his footsteps across the country towards the abbey, more than a mile away, [176] the seclusion of the region, its ineffable quietude, the infinite isolation of the life passed by the silent brotherhood—all bring vividly before the mind the image of that ancient distant abbey with which this one holds connection so sacred and so close. Is it not the veritable spot in Normandy? Here, too, is the broad basin of retired country; here the densely wooded hills, shutting it in from the world; here the orchards and vineyards and gardens of the ascetic devotees; and, as the night falls from the low, blurred sky of gray, and cuts short a silent contemplation of the scene, here, too, one finds one's self, like some belated traveller in the dangerous forests of old, hurrying on to reach the porter's lodge, and ask within the sacred walls the hospitality of the venerable abbot.

II

OFFICE OF THE FATHER PRIOR.

For nearly a century after the death of De Rancé it is known that his followers faithfully maintained his reform at La Trappe. Then the French Revolution drove the Trappists as wanderers into various countries, and the abbey was made a foundery for cannon. A small branch of the order came in 1804 to the United States, and established itself for a while in Pennsylvania, but soon turned its eyes towards the greater wilds and solitudes of Kentucky. [177] For this there was reason. Kentucky was early a great pioneer of the Catholic Church in the United States. Here the first episcopal see of the West was erected, and Bardstown held spiritual jurisdiction, within certain parallels of latitude, over all States and Territories between the two oceans. Here, too, were the first Catholic missionaries of the West, except those who were to be found in the French stations along the Wabash and the Mississippi. Indeed, the Catholic population of Kentucky, which was principally descended from the colonists of Lord Baltimore, had begun to enter the State as early as 1775, the nucleus of their settlements soon becoming Nelson County, the locality of the present abbey. Likewise it should be remembered that the Catholic Church in the United States, especially that portion of it in Kentucky, owes a great debt to the zeal of the exiled French clergy of early days. That buoyancy and elasticity of the French character, which naturally adapts it to every circumstance and emergency, was then most demanded and most efficacious. From these exiles the infant missions of [178] the State were supplied with their most devoted laborers.

Hither, accordingly, the Trappists removed from Pennsylvania, establishing themselves on Pottinger's Creek, near Rohan's Knob, several miles from the present site. But they remained only a few years. The climate of Kentucky was ill suited to their life of unrelaxed asceticism; their restless superior had conceived a desire to christianize Indian children, and so removed the languishing settlement to Missouri. There is not space for following the solemn march of those austere exiles through the wildernesses of the New World. From Missouri they went to an ancient Indian burying-ground in Illinois, and there built up a sort of village in the heart of the prairie; but the great mortality from which they suffered, and the subsidence of the fury of the French Revolution recalled them in 1813 to France, to reoccupy the establishments from which they had been banished.

It was of this body that Dickens, in his American Notes, wrote as follows:

Looming up in the distance, as we rode along, was another of the ancient Indian burial-places, called Monk's Mound, in memory of a body of fanatics of the order of La Trappe, who founded a desolate convent there many years ago, when there were no settlements within a thousand miles, and were all swept off by the pernicious climate; in which lamentable fatality few rational people will suppose, perhaps, that society experienced any very severe deprivation.