The third article of this series was about the priest, Wendelin Pfanner, who at age 38 became a Trappist. In this article the question is: How did the monk Francis turn missionary? The short answer is: by God’s design; the long answer: by a painful process in fidelity to his calling.
Unlikely though it may seem, the Trappist and the missionary already stirred in Fr. Francis when he was still a seminarian. Abbot Francis writes: “Whenever we prayed the ‘Miserere’ [Ps. 51], I felt … an irrepressible urge to go to the missions. The desire to work for the missions tormented me and gave me no peace.” (Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are taken from the Memoirs of Abbot Francis.) His bishop decided that he was not strong enough for missionary work.
So, after his ordination, Wendelin was assigned to parish ministry. He served for nine years at Haselstauden, Austria and afterwards as confessor to sisters in Zagreb, Croatia. In 1863, a long-standing lung condition and other circumstances forced him to turn over a new leaf. Like the seminarian, he was again drawn to both monastic life and the missions. He wanted “to enter an order where the rule is strictly observed,” and at the same time he felt called “to become a missionary in Central Africa,” after the example of his countryman, Ignaz Knoblecher, missionary and explorer in the Congo Basin. However, a life-threatening intestinal inflammation which he had contracted in Suez, Egypt in May that year signaled to him “that I was not fit for Africa.” Therefore, he entered Mariawald Monastery. For the time being, the Trappist vocation prevailed over the missionary.
Prayer, work, and fasting restored Fr. Francis’s (his Trappist name) health and the call to the missions receded to the background. In 1869, he founded Mariastern Monastery in Turkish Bosnia. It was an Islamic country, listed in the books of Propaganda Fide as mission territory. But in July 1880, at the invitation of a missionary bishop, he led an expedition of 33 Trappists to the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, not to become a missionary, but to develop Dunbrody Farm. Two years later, he and his monks exchanged Dunbrody for the province of Natal and founded the Mariannhill Monastery.
What were the chances of a Trappist becoming a missionary?
Trappists are an order of cloistered contemplative monks. Their rule, centering on prayer, penance and perpetual silence, does not provide for missionary work. When they did engage in such work, it was at the express requests of Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII. Abbot Francis (abbot since 26. 12. 1885) explained the specific Trappist vocation before anyone might wonder if the silent monks of Mariannhill were going to turn missionaries. He wrote: “The actual missionaries and the Trappists can be compared to a fire brigade. Some firemen deliver water to the engine; others stand by the hose and direct the water to the fire. … The missionary priests are the actual leaders of the mission and attract attention, but what contemplative men and women contribute to the mission is no less necessary, though less conspicuous; namely, prayer which calls down the grace of the Holy Spirit. If we [Trappists] can no longer be used for anything in Africa except to implore God’s grace upon the missions, we are content and make no other demands.” (Forget-me-Not Nr.5 & 8, 1885)
Their vocation aside, Bishop Jolivet of Natal did not want the Trappists at Mariannhill to be assigned a mission territory of their own, nor should they be supported by missionary organizations such as the Paris Foreign Missionary Society. The monks were to live the life of ora et labora but not work as missionaries. However, the bishop seems not to have reckoned with the people living close to Mariannhill. The Zulus soon discovered Abbot Francis for themselves, not only as a stern Nkosi (lord, landlord) whom they feared, but also as a caring provider. They did not know “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:2), and Abbot Francis wondered, why not. Were they not entitled to the Good News of their salvation? Who was he to withhold it from them? Gradually, closer contact with the indigenous people re-awakened the missionary in him.
The Trappist rule allowed for the regular works of Christian charity – care of orphans, basic schooling, proclaiming the Good News, nursing the sick, feeding the poor – to be performed within the precincts of the monastery, for such works did not fall under the category of missionary activities. However, when in 1886 tribal chiefs arrived in Mariannhill to ask for missionaries and schools, the principle of self-containment had to be reviewed. So far, Mariannhill had “evangelized” by presence; now it was challenged to leave the “safe haven” of monastic enclosure, cross boundaries and come to the aid of people in their physical as well as spiritual needs.
Abbot Francis responded to the call not by choosing missionary activity over monastic observance, but by attempting to combine both. His address at a reception ceremony of Trappist novices says that much: “The heart which is covered by the religious dress must always burn for the order, but head, hands and feet are to work for the missions.” (19.10.1887) His understanding of what Mariannhill’s missionary vocation was also echoes from his well-known maxim: “Our mission field is the Kingdom of God and that has no boundaries” (Josefsblättchen, 1889, No. 1).
According to the general Trappist self-understanding, however, observance and mission were incompatible. The question is therefore legitimate: Did Abbot Francis know what he was getting into? It seems not. But he was determined to try. The many hardships, risks, slanderous accusations, etc., that he faced speak of his determination and resilience.
By 1890, many Mariannhill Trappists were heart and soul missionaries, but not all. So, to forestall polarization, Abbot Francis tightened the rules, only to earn for himself the reputation of being an unyielding radical (“The Disobedient Rebel”). Only very few in the order were willing to credit him with genuine love for both mission and observance. But, controversy aside, his pride and joy was in being a Trappist: “We strictly follow the rule. We do not need mitigations,” he asserted, even at the last General Chapter he attended in 1891.
Nevertheless, confrontation was inevitable, for opinions differed too much. Partly forced by circumstances and partly by his own impetuosity/unyielding manner in opening “too many missions too soon,” he got caught between the camps. Those who knew him less well accused him of stubbornness and disobedience, saying either that he disregarded the rule or that he clung to it too fast. Not everyone managed to walk the tightrope between observance and missionary engagement, or, as the saying was: “primer [to teach reading to children] in one hand and [a Trappist] rulebook in the other.” By 1891, many Mariannhill monks asked themselves if it was reasonable at all to harmonize the two.
Of St. Ansgar, monk and bishop (801-65), his biographer Rimbert had written: “At heart, a monk – in deed, an apostle.” But Ansgar was a Benedictine, not a Trappist. No one in Mariannhill at that time would have agreed with Thomas Merton, himself a Trappist, who wrote that Mariannhill was “an astonishing spectacle of a Trappist mission of contemplative monks who, according to purely Benedictine principles, cultivated an apostolate of prayer and work, of liturgy and the plough.” (The Waters of Siloe. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1949, p. 157) Why? Because their self-image, unbelievable though it may seem, was that of Trappists until long after their separation from the order (1910). (See Article 6 of this series.)
In 1891, Abbot Francis submitted to the General Chapter 16 demands compiled by his missionaries. All expressed but one wish: that Trappist missionaries be treated as any other missionaries. He may still have done so with a divided heart, but barely a year later, challenged by Mariannhill’s visitator, Abbot Francis Strunk, he committed fully to mission. At this point, he still believed that Trappists were the best missionaries as they improved the local infrastructure and thus gave the Gospel a chance to take root among people. He stated firmly: “I am still the old conservative progressive who … as a missionary always strives further, but as a Trappist remains firmly rooted in the old ways.” (Forget-me-not, Special Issue, December 1892. No. I: “More enlightenment.”)
In December 1892, Abbot Francis went into exile rather than betray his convictions. As he stated, he considered himself both “conservative progressive,” but the stress was gradually shifting to “progressive” = missionary. The condition which the visitator Francis Strunk laid down was not so much for Abbot Francis to give up mission work (Strunk was not anti-mission, and the vicar general, Abbot Sebastian Wyart, was decidedly pro-mission), but rather, that Strunk outright rejected mission as carried out by Pfanner – a demand in which the latter felt the old Mariawald resentment against himself and his monasteries (Mariastern, 1869 and Mariannhill, 1882) confirmed. (Strunk had been prior of Mariawald in 1887 and two years later, abbot of Ölenberg, when the slanderous talk about Fr. Francis was still very much alive.) “Betraying his convictions” would have been to betray himself. The founder obeyed his superiors by carrying out the decree of suspension issued to him in 1892; he obeyed God by never betraying the trust he had been given by God for mission.
Only at Emaus, after much prayer and with new insights gained, did he begin to doubt the compatibility of missionary activity with Trappist observance. Accordingly, in November 1905, he signed a petition to Propaganda Fide drafted by Mariannhill’s leading missionaries asking for an adapted rule. 18 months later, however, he was convinced that the two ideals were incompatible. He wrote to his abbot general, Augustin Marré: “If I were young again, … I would certainly not become a Trappist…” Because he despaired of Trappists? Not at all, but because neither he nor his three successors in office had been able to bridge the gap between the two ideals. He continued: “I would rather join a missionary society where they do not constantly quarrel over rule and mission.” (28.3.1907) He then referred to a rule he had written (and sent to Rome with Administrator Abbot Edmund Obrecht) as early as December 1905 for a missionary institute which, under the tutelage of Propaganda Fide, should adopt only their system of manual labor from the Trappists.
Towards the end of his letter to Marré, the aging founder gave free rein to his heart: “I would be the first one [in the new institute he called Propaganda Piccola] to steam to Europe by train [of which he had dreamed] and give a thousand more talks about the progress of the missions in Africa and Russia.” And then – the young Pfanner from his parents’ farm in Langen, Austria comes alive! – “I consider the world a huge dairy cow; whoever knows how to milk it should do it. … I would like the new missionary society … not just in South Africa, but … all over the world … and the Trappists alongside it, so that they could compete with each other. Then it will show which is the better missionary principle, expansion or concentration. … Trappist and missionary under one umbrella are incompatible.”
