The next step came on the Feast of St. Bernard, August 20. That was the last day the monks were allowed the use of their church, which was then padlocked and sealed. They continued to recite the office in their “scriptorium”—a big place like a schoolroom where the monks read and write and study their theology.
Meanwhile, one or two members of the community who were not bound by vows—novices or oblates—returned to their families. The rest stayed. Of those who went home, one was immediately conscripted into the army of the Popular Front, where he was killed, it is thought, by some of his companions in arms. Another died in a forced-labor battalion.
At the monastery there were two or three weeks of relative calm. On September 8, the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, the monks were taking the usual siesta which the Rule provides for during the summer months, when there was a disturbance at the gatehouse. Representatives of the F.A.I, had put in an appearance, and this time they had a government order to close down the monastery and arrest the monks. The Trappists were given two hours to get their things together and clear out. The little packages they gathered up were searched. Breviaries, rosaries, and anything else connected with the worship of God—including the spiritual notes and other private papers of the monks—were all destroyed.
The abbot, Dom Emmanuel Fleché, was respected—not so much because of his rank or his age or his health but because the French consul had expressed official interest in his safety. He was sent to the nearby village of Cóbreces. Two priests, secretaries of the monastery, were also held at Cóbreces by the Reds, who felt sure they might be able to extract some useful information from them. But the body of the community—they made two big busloads—went off down the road between the vineyards full of ripe fruit and vanished in the direction of Santander.
The doors swung shut on a deserted monastery, and the dust settled again in the road and everything was very, very silent.
The two secretaries, Father Eugenio and Father Vicente, seemed to be in the best position of them all. They were not imprisoned, and when they discovered that things were much safer at Bilbao, they began to make arrangements for going there. Before September ended, they had disappeared. But they had not reached Bilbao. Their bodies were found full of bullets on the road between Torrelavega and Santander, at a place called the Cuesta de las Anguilas. The villagers of Rumoroso recognized them as monks of Viaceli and gave them a Christian burial.
Dom Emmanuel Fleche, protected by the fact that he was a foreigner, was taken to a coastal fishing village which had been marked off as an international zone. It was full of refugees, who lived in the barracks of a big summer camp that served in peacetime as a resort for students from Madrid. The place was given a wide berth by the Fascist bombers, and Dom Emmanuel was relatively safe. Someone smuggled Hosts to him from Santander, and he said Mass, using his Cistercian cowl for a vestment and offering the Blood of Christ in a silver-plated cup that had been awarded to some champion football team of the locality. Someone had also brought him a paten that had been picked out of the ruins of a burned church. On December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, he received notice that he was to sail for France the following day, which he did. He returned to Viaceli when the war was over and finally died there.
As his ship put out to sea, the lonely old abbot of Viaceli may have guessed that these waters had already received into them the bodies of more than ten of his murdered sons.
The two busloads of Trappists who arrived in Santander on September 8 were imprisoned in the college of the Salesian Fathers. After a relatively short time a friend of theirs, not without considerable risk, engineered their release, and they were paroled. They came out into the town, separated into several groups, and lived together wherever they found hospitality in Catholic homes. Many of them escaped to Bilbao.
Father Pio Heredia, the prior, refused his chance to escape and remained in Santander with the largest group of monks, to do what he could to take care of the dispersed community.
In this sixty-one-year-old Cistercian, who was at once profoundly contemplative and capable of energetic and wise command, the monks found the support and the example of sanctity. Father Pio belonged to that generation of Cistercians whom Divine Providence seems to have brought to the cloisters of the White Monks to carry through the work of transformation and unification that immediately followed the reunion of 1892. He had entered the Order at Val San José in 1890. In his forty-six years of cloistered life, steeped in the atmosphere of Benedictine prayer, humility, constant absorption in the presence of God, he had been filled with the spirit and the strength and the peace of the old monastic patriarchs. Although his profound love of the Rule necessarily gave his spirituality the austere and penitential character inseparable from St. Benedict and from Cîteaux, still there was more than mere negation in the soul of Father Pio Heredia. The one element of his spirituality that dominated all the rest and absorbed everything else to itself was love, the love of God: it was a love that transcended all sentiment and emotionality, to attach itself to God’s all-wise Providence and His all-loving will. It was a love that pierced the darkness of every tribulation, every contradiction, and recognized the wise action of a God of love behind the superficial evil of secondary causes. It was a love strong enough to win the great grace of martyrdom.
Most of the men who went to their death with him had been formed to the religious life by Father Pio Heredia when he was novice master at Viaceli. The last days they spent with him were the crown and consummation of their monastic lives.
Although Father Pio and his monks were living across the street from the headquarters of the Red secret police, they lived a life that was entirely monastic and contemplative, beginning each morning with Matins and Lauds at five, followed by Mass—which was said at a dining-room table. There was reading, meditation, manual labor. The whole day revolved around Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, just as it had done at Viaceli, except that the Holy Eucharist was hidden in a dining-room cupboard and not in the Tabernacle of a high altar. They even received Mass stipends from the superioress of some Visitandine nuns who had not yet been dispersed.
The two months spent by the Cistercians at 27 Calle del Sol, Santander, were a final retreat, a preparation for the act that was to be the crown of their monastic vocations. Although they had hoped, for a time, that they would be able to return to their monastery—and even, as Dom Emmanuel expressed it in a letter, to “sing Matins there on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception”—they were surely not surprised that Providence, whose mysterious ways Father Pio had taught them all to contemplate and to adore, had arranged otherwise.
On December 1, in the middle of the morning, they were surprised by the sudden visit of a stranger who claimed that he was an electrician and who insisted on being admitted to the apartment, even when he was assured that there was nothing wrong with the lights. They were ready, then, for the worst.
During the day a young monk who was living alone in another part of town, Frater Alvaro, a cleric, came to visit them. That was how he happened to be with them at the time of the arrest. It was late afternoon when the police came to take them to the comisaría.
At the headquarters of the anarchist G.P.U. they found that several lay brothers, living in a separate group, had been arrested earlier. Handcuffed, they were sitting in silence, waiting for the “trial.”
Commissioner Neila, who was to be their judge, was a bankrupt draper. He had turned Communist and was no exception to the brutality and stupidity of his type: the insignificant functionary who has suddenly acquired the power of life and death over other men. He spent his nights presiding over the baneful tribunal that disposed, according to his fancy, of everyone that came up before him. The only thing he had to worry about was to keep his balance on the Party line and conform to the exact shade of orthodoxy that was dictated for that precise moment.
With monks, of course, there were no complications. Everybody knew that monks were all Fascists and that their mona
steries were full of money and machine guns. The main idea was to beat them until they told you where they had hidden their money, and then shoot them.
Like all Spaniards, Neila liked to start his evening’s fun quite late. He did not get around to the monks until one o’clock in the morning. The first one to appear was Father Pio, the prior, and the interest of the commissioner of public order was sharpened to the keenest pitch when he found that a letter containing two hundred pesetas, addressed to Father Pio, had been found in the search.
The prior was questioned. That means, he took a beating. He could not talk without giving away the identity of the Visitandine superioress who had been sending Mass stipends. Therefore he said nothing. His face was swollen and full of blood when he came back to the rest of them in their cell.
One by one the monks and brothers were called into the presence of the commissioner. Since they obviously knew nothing about the money, they did not get so much of a beating, and one of them was even released. Apparently they were not quite sure whether or not he was a Trappist, anyway.
This was Frater Marcelino, a twenty-three-year-old novice with a talent for painting and poetry. He had made an earlier entry into the novitiate at Viaceli but had left in 1931, a short time after receiving the habit. Now he had returned, in 1936, just in time for the Red persecution. This time, although he was only a novice and was therefore free to go wherever and whenever he liked, he stayed with the community in prison and in secular life at Santander. Now that he was formally released, he took his departure. But he was not destined to be separated from his brothers for long. He was finally betrayed, recaptured, and shot. And so, he finally made his stability with the monks of Viaceli who were already in heaven before him. . . .
Indeed, when we look at the men who were gathered that night in the Red comisaria at Santander, we can find plenty of material for meditation on that Providence of which Father Pio had loved to speak to his novices.
Frater Alvaro, whom we have already mentioned, had been an oblate in the monks’ school, closed by the government in 1931. Instead of wandering off into the world and losing touch with Viaceli, he had returned in a year or so to take the novice’s habit. Then, after being separated from the rest in Santander, he happened along on the very afternoon of the arrest.
Another prisoner was Frater Antonio. He had been dismissed from a seminary because he did not have enough brains to be a priest. He could not make anything of his books. The Cistercians at Viaceli had not been able to receive him to profession, either. They kept him as an oblate. He could have gone home when the Reds threatened the monastery. He did not. Providence was reserving for him a higher place in heaven than would go to many a brilliant theologian.
Among the lay brothers was Brother Eustaquio. He was forty-five. Years before, when he was very young, he had entered another monastery of the Order, San Isidro, and had even made simple profession there. Before the time came for solemn vows, he had changed his mind and returned to the world. In 1929 he came back to the cloister, this time at Viaceli. He had made his vows. He was an exemplary brother.
Then there was Brother Angel, the oldest, who was sixty-eight. He had lived in the world as a married man. His wife died, and he entered Viaceli in 1931. After his simple profession he was sent to the foundation of Santa Maria de Huerta. Huerta was in Nationalist territory during the war. But just before the trouble started, Brother Angel became ill and was sent back to Viaceli. There, his vows expired. He renewed them. Just before the Reds came, the old brother, knowing what was ahead, made his solemn profession.
If we knew the stories of them all, we would find many strange things to think about. There were two men of superior learning among them: Father Amedeo and Father Juan Bautista. Together they had edited a little Spanish magazine, for monks and friends, about the life and affairs of the Order. It was called La Voz del Cister. Others of the group were only boys. Brother Ezequiel was nineteen, Brother Eulogio twenty.
They all appeared before Neila, who cursed them and threatened them and had them pushed around. He could not get anything much out of them. In the end he sent them all back and called in Father Pio Heredia.
“You!” roared Neila when the prior returned. “Either you tell us where you have hidden the money or you can pick your own brand of martyrdom.”
Father Pio said: “Do as you please.”
So he was again beaten, and the death sentence was passed on the twelve innocent men.
No one knows what happened to their bodies. In two groups—on December 3 and December 4—they were taken out somewhere, shot—no doubt—and thrown into the sea.
Only a young lay-brother oblate was allowed to go free. Thanks to his release, the story of the others was made known to the Cistercians who had escaped to the more Catholic atmosphere of Bilbao, in the Basque country.
When this diabolical little war ceased tearing Spain to pieces, Dom Emmanuel returned. The monks who still survived gathered around him once again, happy to find that there was still something left of their monastery. Empty storerooms and a few desecrated statues in the sanctuary were all that bore witness to the short-lived Red rule of the province.
In the powerful Catholic revival that followed the carnage of the Spanish Civil War, the Cistercian monasteries of the Peninsula have all grown. One of them, San Isidro, made a new foundation in 1942, in the darkest days of the European conflict. It is called Nuestra Señora de los Mártires (Our Lady of the Martyrs).
But no sooner was the pressure upon the Church in Spain relieved than it was applied with equal force at another point. The Nazi occupation of Austria led to the suppression of the Trappist monastery of Engelszell on the banks of the Danube. The Gestapo arrived on July 27, 1939, and immediately took the abbot and prior off to prison. The subprior and several monks soon followed, and the monastery was completely suppressed on November 2. The property was confiscated, and several members of the community were condemned to internment at Dachau—a camp whose very name has become synonymous with an earthly hell. Naturally, they did not survive.
It was only in 1946 that a combined death notice for all the deceased of Engelszell finally reached our American monasteries: the interminable list of these innocent men, condemned as enemies of Reich und Volk, was read out in our chapter rooms.
They joined their Spanish brethren in the light of glory, victims of the same hatred of God and His Church, although they happened to have been killed by the Nazis instead of by the Reds. It is a strange irony that the Nazis, who had fought the Communists in Spain, were at that moment entering an alliance with Soviet Russia which led to the martyrdom of a whole Catholic nation: as if any further proof were needed as to the futility of political motives, which cannot obscure the real issue in all these chaotic upheavals of our time.
September, 1939, saw the long-dreaded opening of hostilities. The general mobilization in France and Belgium once more drained monasteries and seminaries of men. The archabbey of the Order saw forty religious leave for the front. Bellefontaine lost nineteen out of forty-nine and Sept-Fons sent thirty men to the army. Many monks followed the footsteps of Máxime Carlier and left Chimay for the armed forces: this time there were twenty-five. All down the list of our houses it was the same. Yet, there were surprisingly few casualties. All of Cîteaux’s forty came home again. None of the thirty men from Sept-Fons was lost. And Bellefontaine’s contingent not only came home intact, but two of them had the Croix de guerre. One of these was the abbot, Dom Gabriel Sortais; he was wounded at Lille, where he went into action with the Twenty-Fifth French Infantry Motorized Division. He was taken prisoner by the Nazis, and starved for a winter in a prison camp in Prussia. In 1941 he returned to his monastery to spend the rest of the war in the quiet routine of Cistercian life.
Ste. Marie du Mont, which had been gutted by a bombardment in the first war, contributed forty men to the various armies. The monastery was again bombarded, and twenty-four of her men went to German prison camps. All eventually returned exc
ept one lay brother killed at Hazebrouck. The year 1943 found the monastery repaired and most of the community living a normal life within its walls; and soon postulants began to arrive in considerable numbers, and when the war ended, the house was bigger than it had been in 1939. . . .
When the German armies flooded France in 1940, many Cistercian communities fled before them, and the houses in the south of France began to bulge with refugees. But a relative calm was soon restored, and communities sorted themselves out, ending up more or less in their proper places. Then followed the long, lean, dreary years of the Nazi occupation. Outwardly, everything went on smoothly, but they were years of strain, interrupted by sudden flurries of violence. Few indeed were the monasteries whose peace was not shattered at least once by the incursions of the Gestapo. These guests invariably turned the house upside down looking for concealed weapons and “maquisards,” and sometimes they were all too close to finding certain persons they were very interested in apprehending. M. Schumann, who later became French Prime Minister, found refuge at Notre Dame des Neiges, in the mountains of Southern France, where he took the oblate’s habit and followed the whole routine of the monastery. If the Gestapo had penetrated the enclosure of the abbey of Bellefontaine in a certain week of August, 1944, they would have run into a storm of machine-gun bullets, for a detachment of Allied parachutists had landed and were hiding there. As it was, one or two Cistercian monks who had returned from the army had not ceased waging a secret campaign against the Nazis.
Father Guenael, a patriotic Breton, cellarer of the monastery of Thymadeuc, in the Morbihan, was in constant contact with the Free French leaders abroad and offered all the aid he could to Allied agents and parachutists. When compromising papers and a cache of firearms were discovered, Father Guenael was arrested by the Gestapo and disappeared from Brittany forever. News finally arrived that he was in the concentration camp of Neuengamme, where he died.
The Waters of Siloe Page 25
