I went to Buckfast Abbey for the Good Friday service, to my local church in Bovey Tracey for the Easter Vigil and to the Anglican church in Widecombe-in-the-Moor for the Sunday morning service. The reason for this now well-established sequence is that my brother’s widow comes to stay with me for the Triduum and likes the majesty of Buckfast, but wants to get home as quickly as possible after the end of Lent to have our first drink in 45 days.
I had not been to Buckfast for some time and it has certainly changed. The scaffolding which had seemed in danger of becoming a permanent fixture has gone, the buildings are sparklingly clean and the tourist facilities modern and bright.
So much for the outside; but it is changing inside as well. When I first started going there 10 years ago there was a longish procession of monks, but this year there was just a handful and all seemed elderly.
Buckfast will survive as long as there are any monks at all because it draws a large income from its most famous products: honey and especially Buckfast tonic wine, the proceeds from which it spends generously on local community projects.
The latter is a source of grievance north of the border where it is said to fuel violence among the youth of Glasgow, a claim which resulted in a demand for the abbey to lose its charitable status last spring.
It seemed an odd demand to me. Many things in this world, from alcohol to the internet, from television to pop music, from freedom of speech to law itself, can be used for good or ill and abusus non tollit usum, as Cicero would say.
However, I digress. Vocations are dwindling, monastic communities are ageing and secularism does what it can to undermine what remains.
Fr Christopher Jamison scored a bullseye when he opened up Worth Abbey to half a dozen young men for the BBC programme The Monastery. It was a surprise success and interest in the monastic life soared, but a rise in interest or even in understanding is not quite the same as a rise in vocations.
How much does it matter? Catholics should face up to that question because I suspect it matters less than we may think and certainly than we may instinctively feel. It certainly matters that people are losing sight of the contemplative life, of prayer, of devoting one’s life visibly and exclusively to God. What matters less is that believers are not flocking in large numbers to monasteries to do that. One real vocation is worth a hundred wobbly ones. A major benefit of the fall in numbers is the quality and durability of the vocations being answered.
There was a time when, we should be honest enough to admit, the religious life offered security. Families in Ireland, for example, had large numbers of children who had few opportunities open to them, and entry to convents and monasteries promised training, qualifications, a reliable roof over their heads and regular meals. What is more, it was such a normal choice to make that it required much less agonising than it would now.
That is why so many left after Vatican II. Some had lost their faith but the majority merely wanted a different way to express it. Once a call to the mission field was most easily answered by joining a religious order, but now one can work for a religious aid agency with much less hassle.
Several of the nuns who taught me left convent life. One of my fellow pupils entered it and left some years later, saying that it was not for her. She then married. So, I wonder, did she simply break her solemn vows or did she find her true vocation?
Yes, she broke her vows and those vows were made to God, but maybe it is that that we need to look at. Such vows are for a lifetime. Why? Why should one not be able to give a period of one’s life that way and then serve God with equal enthusiasm but through a different lifestyle such as marriage and children?
Why must it be all or nothing for everyone?
I rather like the idea of temporary monks and nuns. At any rate, I like it more than the idea of empty monasteries and convents, and those who will see it through until death could benefit hugely from the fellowship and help thus provided.
My good friend Fr Jamison disagrees, although he points out that once there were lay brothers and that even now we have the concept of people “living alongside”, although only for a year or two.
OK, so be it. Then how do we fill the monasteries, or at any rate half-fill them? Or do we just not bother?
Ann Widdecombe is a novelist, broadcaster and former prisons minister
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