Laetificat: Valley of Our Lady Cistercian Monastery

For today’s Feast of St Anthony of the Desert (aka St Anthony, Abbot or St Anthony the Great), and because the primary focus of this blog is how Madison is rejoicing in Jesus Christ, I wanted to show you a really wonderful religious community in our diocese: the nuns of Valley of Our Lady Cistercian Monastery in Prairie du Sac, near Sauk City. They are a cloistered monastery that rises way before the crack of dawn and chants the whole Liturgy of the Hours in Latin every day. They’re the only contemplative monastery in the diocese, and the only monastery of Cistercian nuns of the common observance in the country, and they’re praying for us night and day, even though most people don’t even know they’re there.

As a branch of the Benedictine family, Cistercian spirituality is “ora et labora”, pray and work. Their primary, most important work is as official pray-ers of the Liturgy of the Hours, the opus Dei, the Prayer of the Church. Fittingly, they don’t just say this prayer but sing the Gregorian chant. The Church prays through their voices, and God listens and responds with grace for us all. Another essential form of prayer for them is Lectio Divina, meditative and contemplative reading. They also do manual labor in the form of various tasks around the monastery and also the work of making altar breads, which is how they support themselves. They practice silence, except for a daily time of social recreation.

Some catechesis: under Church law, there are quite a few different forms of consecrated life other than religious life. Within true religious life, women’s religious communities are of two different major types: active communities like the Sinsinawa Dominicans or the Dominicans of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, who make simple vows and are called Sisters, and contemplative monastic communities who make solemn perpetual vows and are called nuns. A nun is the counterpart of a monk, a contemplative monastic who takes solemn vows. Sisters are often called nuns colloquially, but, for instance, the “Nuns on the Bus” are Sisters and not nuns. The Cistercians are nuns.

continue at Laetificat Madison