BELMONT JOURNAL

I was surprised to find this video which is about my monastery.   I was sent by the abbot with two others to found a monastery in Peru in 1981 and shall be returning to Belmont in January, 2018 at the age of 80, my mission having been completed.   Of the other two, Father Luke left reluctantly because the abbot in 1991 decided that, at his age, it was better that he should have all the benefits of the National Health, and he died this last year; and the other left, just as reluctantly, to become the present abbot, elected by the Belmont community in 2000, after having actually founded the present monastery in Peru.

If you watch this video, you will see a monk who clearly is not English: he is, in fact, a Peruvian called Brother Wilmer.   He represented the community here at a chapter in Belmont.   He was a nurse in a "centro de salud" in the countryside not far from Tambogrande where the doctor sometimes didn't turn up, so he is quite good at diagnosis.  Now he is guestmaster and a very hard worker. Wilmer is one of the people I will miss when I return to Belmont.

   I was interim superior of the monastery for nine years until a Peruvian could be chosen as Prior; and now that Father Alex is Prior, chosen in March 2016,  it was only a matter of time before someone - in this case, a Peruvian monk who is a medical doctor, suggested that I should follow Father Luke.

  

Father Alex and I are very close friends, and there was no sense of rupture with the change of superior; but, as he is so much more practical and dynamic than I, there is a change of pace, which is just as it should be.  I return to Belmont with an immense sense of satisfaction that, often in spite of my own weaknesses, God's will has been done.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Belmont has given up its school.  As a past pupil and teacher and chaplain in the school, I considered this to be a disaster, the end of something really worthwhile; and the school still lives on in my dreams, although Peruvian boys increasingly become members of the school I visit in my sleep.  Nevertheless, the closure of the school has enabled the monastery to concentrate more on its essential vocation, and I need to do the same.

I feel as reluctant as Frs Luke and Paul did when they left Peru but know it isn't the end of the world.   Please pray for me, for our house in Peru, and for Belmont.

When I studied theology at Fribourg from 1961 till 1964, my very closest friend among the students was Dom Robert Gough of Quarr.  This was because there was a group of Downside monk and another group of Ampleforth monks studying theology at the same time, but only one from Quarr and one from Belmont.  He was older than I and had done his National Service in the Royal Navy, while I had gone straight into the monastery.   He introduced me to Wagner and we had immense fun laughing at everybody else.   He later became prior of Quarr and died some years ago.  Resquiescat en pace