The Benedictine Communities
The Benedictine communities founded by Boniface Wimmer in America were devoted to the service of God, the pursuit of learning, and the education of youth. Before those directives could be fully implemented, however, land had to be cleared, crops planted, sources of energy harnessed, and shelters constructed. One group of monks known as the laybrothers was tasked with the building of the Saint Vincent campus and with providing for the needs of the monastery, parish, and school.
Saint Vincent Archabbey and College, like most other institutions today, now rely upon outside sources to furnish basic needs and materials. But, shortly after its founding, the Archabbey, Seminary, College, and Parish developed into a totally self-sufficient community due in large part to the skillsets found among the laybrothers. These men of various backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures were industrious, driven, and focused. Among their group were farmers, carpenters, cooks, brewers, blacksmiths, printers, tinsmiths, dairymen, butchers, barbers, surveyors, painters, artists, sculptors, coalminers, masons, coopers, and infirmarians.
Brother Timothy Waid as a young infirmarian taking the pulse of a patient.
The products of their labors can still be seen today among the many buildings, statues, furnishings, and edifices that they constructed from the natural resources of the region, and several buildings on campus continue to hold some of the implements once utilized by the lay-brothers. The old Abbey Press building, for example, which stands near the main entrance to campus, contains woodworking machinery and tools used by the carpenters who erected buildings and crafted furnishings from the oak, chestnut, and walnut trees harvested on Chestnut Ridge.
An old printing press still resides in one corner of that same building. Near the powerhouse and just below Parking Lot B stands a building referred to as the “tin shop.” Within that building, members of the lay-brother community once shod horses and mules, butchered cattle, processed and stored food products, and fabricated construction materials and implements out of metal. A pair of tongs and a hammer now covered in soot and ash rests quietly near an anvil where the last Saint Vincent blacksmith placed them some seventy years ago. One of the few remaining active trades from the lay-brother era can still be viewed at Saint Vincent today: monks working in the nineteenth century Gristmill, located along Beatty Road just north of campus, grind grain into flour needed in the production of baked goods in the same way the millers had done 150 years earlier.
Brother Lambert Berens tending to the Saint Vincent farm crops.
The lay-brother community is no more; the laybrother status was phased out as a distinct class of monks in 1968. And so, now, the blacksmith’s hearth is cold, the printing press sits idle, and the farmland where crops once grew and orchards were once tended supports expansive grassy lawns. No longer are bricks handmade on site; nor altars carved; nor wagons, buggies, and barrels assembled.
But the contributions of the laybrothers are the foundation upon which Saint Vincent was built.
It fell upon the laybrothers’ strong shoulders and working hands to ensure that the young community of American monks not only survived but thrived in this new land.
Most of these men labored in relative obscurity, focusing on the greater good of the community rather than the welfare or concern of the individual. Their commonality of religion, place, norms, customs, and status helped define the lay-brother community. It is because of this unique group of men who toiled daily that Boniface Wimmer’s dream of a Benedictine community in America became a reality.