At the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux, 42-year-old monk Brother Luis Cortez sits behind two computer monitors in his office, busily responding to phone calls while simultaneously checking website analytics. His long black beard falls over the black Champion zip-up hoodie he normally wears over his traditional monastic robe, as he leans into the screen to update the @MonksOfVina Instagram account and exchange emails with Californians who inquire about spiritual retreats.
His office sits in a brick building at the intersection of the Northern California monastery’s two roads. On one side are the walnut trees and grapevines of California’s Sacramento Valley. On the other side are the closed red gates to the cloister, a secluded area normally reserved for the monks. Founded in 1955, the monastery belongs to the Trappist-Cistercian order of the Roman Catholic faith, and the monks that live there follow the nearly thousand-year tradition of selective silence, prayer and manual labor.
But monastic life is under threat nationwide, from the Carmelites in New York to the Dominicans in LA. In California, abbeys are closing rapidly. And unlike the Jesuits, another Roman Catholic order, the Trappists are sworn to seclusion; unable to proselytize in their community, they can’t rely on traditional outreach techniques.
“There’s no reason to sugarcoat it,” Cortez said. “Monasteries are closing left and right, even in our own order.”
Faced with this new reality, the monks at New Clairvaux are trying to keep their tradition alive in untraditional ways.
Three hours north of San Francisco, halfway between Chico and Red Bluff, the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux is located in Vina, a small town founded shortly after the end of the Gold Rush. It’s built on land originally belonging to the Nomlaki and Konkow Maidu people and was later taken by Danish prospector Peter Lassen, who established a 22,000-acre ranch. It was eventually purchased by businessman and politician Leland Stanford in 1881, who used the land to build the world’s then-largest vineyard. After the death of Stanford’s wife in 1905, the property was divided and sold off.
In 1955, Trappist monks bought 600 acres of the land, drawing on a history of Italian Cistercian winemaking to revive the accompanying vineyard. The monks’ bet paid off —the monastery sells about 15,000 cases of wine each year, bringing in enough profit to support the vineyard while also maintaining the abbey’s standard of living. With the help of 2023’s Best Woman Winemaker winner Aimée Sunseri, their wines have been winning awards across California.
Beyond the Napa-threatening bottles, the chapel house attracts thousands of tourists per year. The stones that make up the chapel house were first used to construct Santa Maria de Óvila, a 13th-century Cistercian monastery in Spain. After the original monastery was abandoned, the stones were brought to the Bay Area in 1931 by William Randolph Hearst.
Though Hearst reportedly planned to use the stones to build an indoor swimming pool, Depression-era troubles instead led him to donate the stones to the city of San Francisco before his construction project could ever be realized. When the Abbey of New Clairvaux was founded in 1955, Father Thomas Davis passed through the city, learning of the stones, which were in storage in Golden Gate Park to be used for the de Young Museum. Plans to reconstruct the chapter house never came to fruition. In 1995, Davis, by then abbot of New Clairvaux, came to an agreement with the city: He could take the stones, under the condition that the chapel house be open to the public. Nearly 20 years later, construction was completed, and New Clairvaux held up their end of the promise; the chapter house is open all-day, free of admission. They hold services multiple times a day, allowing guests to join them in chants and hymns.
Now, the historic chapel is the abbey’s most well-known feature. The architecture is classically Cistercian: the sleek white stones and angular pillars cause a cavernous echo, and the bright natural glow lights up the abbey’s central golden organ. Looking out the glass doorway to the vineyard outside, the rippling heat and California palms make the whole atmosphere stand out against the surrounding miles of farming towns.
For visitors — religious or otherwise — who want a longer stay, the abbey offers paid retreats. Guests stay in guest housing with access to monk-cooked pescatarian meals, and the historic chapter house is only a short walk away.
“When people come to this place, they step out of their normal ambiance, and their normal way of living,” Davis said.
Since 1965, the number of Catholic religious brothers in the U.S. has decreased by nearly three quarters, from 12,000 to 3,500. Fewer men are becoming novices, and monastic populations are shrinking around the country as a result. The monk in charge of training novices at New Clairvaux, 44-year-old Father Guerric Llanes, a soft-spoken Bruneian Canadian, acknowledges how difficult the path to monkhood is. Starting as an “aspirant,” it’s a minimum of six years until a new monk is fully integrated into their monastery.
From SFGate
This is an absolutely beautiful place to visit. The abbey is wonderful. Try to be there for the noon prayers of others during the day.
The organ is very nice.
Well worth the trip.
I have been there as well and agree with Bob One. If you can make a retreat there, all the better. The rarefied spiritual atmosphere of a Trappist monastery is good medicine. On the side, I visited there for two days in the middle 80s and there was a diocesan priest there with members of his congregation also on retreat. I spoke to the priest who turned out to be an ardent foe of Pope John Paul II. The goal of his retreat was to strategize their opposition and grow it. He tried earnestly to enroll me in his cause and was genuinely surprised that I wasn’t interested. My memory is that he was a priest in the Bay Area somewhere. If he is still alive, I’m sure he is breathing easier with Pope Francis. Whether there were monks of like mind at New Clairvaux at the time who facilitated this subversive group I don’t know. But there are all kinds of monks in a different Trappist Abbey that I new quite well, and some monks, at least at the time, were quite liberal opponents of JP II.
Trappist monks who were “quite liberal opponents of JPII?” What were they opposed to, exactly? Did they have theological disagreements with the Church? Not fun to visit– and find this out. Also, it would be a miserable visit, if one discovered them to be crazy liberal social activists for “gay rights” or some awful thing….. can you explain more about them?
Perhaps it was imprudent of me to speak of “liberal” monks at all. Back in the 80s most Trappist monasteries had larger numbers of monks and in the case of one particular abbey, there was a push for the ordination of women by some monks with the backing of the abbot. That was then and now with dwindling numbers no such advocacy remains, as far as I can tell. I don’t think retreatants now need to worry about political statements either. Gay rights? Not a peep as far as I can tell from the abbey I knew well back in the 80s. So my apologies for raising fear and concern among readers here.
These monks are not crazy liberals, are they, like the transgender “Benedictine hermit” in Kentucky– a woman pretending to be a man, and taking vows as a Benedictine hermit– is “she” also studying for the priesthood, as a hermit monk? Crazy! The Vatican should investigate the Kentucky hermit monk and “her” bishop…. how about the monks of New Clairvaux?
I am sure that this lovely monastery must have some good retreat programs for the public. A long time ago, I once had a bad– but very surprising, and comical– experience at a retreat I registered for, featuring a famous Trappist monk and priest, who was a renowned speaker. I paid $350 for this, and went with some Catholic lady friends at my church. Well, I was shocked and disappointed, to find out that the monk spent a great deal of time complaining, in his lectures, wondering if he had “missed out” on his “human development,” as he had not been married, and “in a relationship,” to find out all about that. A bunch of surprisingly phony, useless, waste-of-time psycho-babble, by a grown man in his 60s. He never spoke fondly of “the missed joys of marriage, and beloved children, a happy, loving husband and father, in a happy, loving, warm family home.” Just whining and complaining about “missed human developnent” in the great, “psycho babble” of the 1960s-style, “man-and-a-woman relationship,” romance-and-marriage– “missed out on,” by poor little him… I was ready to laugh and scream out loud, about paying to hear this! I thought of many married couples who were dealing with all the normal struggles in life, and some who were also dealing with a spouse who seemed “too selfish” to be in a marriage and do their end of it right…. one Catholic man I knew of, callously said to his wife, a friend of mine– after she had just had twins– that when he came home from work, he did not want to help her change a diaper, as he already went to “his job,” and she was at home all day, with “her job,” caring for their little three-year-old, and newborn twins…. she had given up her job, to be a full time mother. The Catholic young man, from a large family of six siblings, enjoyed all their church group fun activities and “relatiobship” stuff. That was fun. But he did not want to change a diaper when he got home from work…… so much for “fun relationship exercises” in the popular marriage groups of that day. What did this handsome, popular guy “miss,” exactly, in his “human development?” It’s obvious. Sadly, their marriage broke up and they got a “Catholic annulment” in the 1970s, after celebrating their 10th anniversary. The popular, liberal priest in charge of their parish’s “Marriage Encounter” program helped with the annulnent process. And the monk? What would the monk give to God, in his relationship with God? And to others? Was God truly calling this monk to his monastic vocation in life? That is very personal. Throw away all the “psycho-babble,” “Me-Me-Me Generation” books– and serve God and others. Give of yourself. Grow up. And do not waste our time with your personal problems. What will you give to us poor retreatants? Oh, what a big laugh! This Trappist monk also had previously been a friend of the popular Trappist monk, priest and spiritual author, in Kentucky, Thomas Merton, but was from a different monastery, located in upstate New York. However, I later found out that Thomas Merton and other monks at Merton’s Kentucky Trappist monastery, did not keep their vows of celibacy, and terrible scandals had occured, there. Some of the reported scandals involved sickening homosexual pervert relationships among the monks. It all made me sick. Merton was also rumored to have fathered a child before becoming a monk, and of having at least one or more lovers, as a monk. There was reportedly one 19-year-old nurse that he said he had “fallen in love” with, whom he had met during a hospital stay, and the two reportedly became lovers, although Merton was more than twice her age. After Merton was discharged from the hospital, she regularly visited Merton at his hermitage, at his monastery. Then the girl found another man and fell in love with him, and told Merton that she was going to marry him, and she ended her relationship with Merton. All of that was reported. Merton died in 1968 in a tragic, sudden accident, in Thailand, while on a monastic trip to Asia, as everyone knows.
I don’t have any way to know the truth of the news reports about Thomas Merton and the monks of his monastery. Some of the information was written in Merton’s journals. And the monastery would not allow him to write about anything scandalous in his books– he wasn’t allowed to tell everything in his famous biography, “The Seven Storey Mountain.” He did write about his affair with the nurse, and his hopelessly passionate love for her– and details of their relationship, such as how they were allowed by Merton’s psychiatrist (why was Merton seeing a psychiatrist?) to use his office, and were reportedly in there for many hours, drinking champagne and kissing and celebrating their passionate love affair… when the monastey Abbot found out about this, he got mad, but didn’t kick Merton out. Etc. etc. Merton called his “beloved” on the phone, every chance he got, and she reportedly visited him… Was an older Catholic priest and monk in his 50s “grooming” a young 19-year-old Kentucky girl, for sex? It was also reported that some of the other monks propositioned and had affairs with lay women who worked at the monastery. And some had gay lovers. A big sordid mess to clean up. Hard to understand why all of this happened. Why weren’t wayward monks simply kicked out and laicized?
In 2014, a former accountant at the Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky, John Hutchins, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for embezzlement of more than $1 million from the monastery.
The embezzler protested, stating that he was targeted for revealing news of the problems of many sexual affairs of the monks, which were allowed, and went unpunished, at the monastery. After serving about 7 years in prison, in 2021 Gov. Andy Beshear decided to commute sentences of 600 non-violent and non-sex offender inmates, including Hutchins, due to trying to halt the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the prisons. After being set free, the Gethsemani monks requested repayment of the money Hutchins stole. He replied to them that since his prison sentence was commuted by the Governor, he was not required to repay the money that he stole. And his prison sentence did not require financial restitution. What a big mess. The Abby of Gethsemani is considered to be the oldest continuously operating monastery in the U.S.
Thomas Merton established a Trust to take over the care of his works and his journals, after his death. He had certain stipulations regarding his works and his journals. He did decide not to remove information he wrote in his journals, about his love affair with the nurse. But he did decide to burn all of the nurse’s letters, when the affair was over. The affair happened in 1966, and Merton died in the famous, tragic accident in Thailand, while on his monastic trip, in 1968. On this fatal trip, Merton explored Christian-Buddhist concepts, attended conferences and gave lectures, and had a meeting with the Dalai Lama. Sadly, after Merton’s death, his body was loaded onto a military plane carrying home the bodies of American soldiers who had been killed in the Vietnam War– a war that Merton was very much against. The Merton Trust made decisions to remove the most intimate passages in Merton’s journals, regarding the physical, sexual intimacy of Merton’s encounters with his beloved nurse, to protect them both. The nurse had married another man, and did not want to talk or have any contact with interviewers, scholars or historians, regarding her former love affair with the monk and priest. The Merton Trust made a firm decision that historians, scholars, and others, are not to ever be allowed to examine this sensitive, intimate material. However, the material was strictly preserved, never to be destroyed. Many religious scholars view Merton’s life as
a man who was a monk and priest, going through many phases of personal growth. I see it as a warning for the laity– there is too much clerical sex abuse, and “cover-ups” by superiors– and I fear that many children, vulnerable young people, and others- who may be vulnerable —- may not be safe, in our Church. That’s the way it looks, to me.