“Meet the Monks Who Spend Their Lives Praying for Ireland’s Priests”: Crux

“Meet the Monks Who Spend Their Lives Praying for Ireland’s Priests”: Crux March 20, 2017

feature:

Prayer, reparation, and praising God are the focus of a new Benedictine priory in Ireland, which focuses especially on reparation for the sins of priests.

“It was never our predetermined plan to come to Ireland,” Silverstream Priory’s Father Benedict Anderson, O.S.B., told Catholic News Agency. “But we believe that, through circumstances that we could never have foreseen, Divine Providence placed us here to play some sort of role, however modest, in the life of the Irish Church.”

Silverstream Priory is the home of the Benedictine Monks of Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

The priory is a former residence of the Visitation Sisters in Stamullen, a village about 22 miles north of Dublin. It is believed to be the first monastery established in Ireland’s County Meath since King Henry VIII suppressed them.

more (The stories of how these Americans etc ended up as monks in Ireland are fascinating. And this is v. resonant with the book I’m editing, which should go off to the publishers this week…)
ETA: Title changed (as the title of the Crux piece was changed) after strong protest by the monks themselves, who found it injurious to Irish priests. I don’t think I agree with that but a) it’s not as if I know the cultural context well & really what do I know? and b) I don’t generally try to make monks’ lives harder.


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