A Tree Rooted in Faith
A History of Queen of Angels Monastery
Alberta Dieker, OSB
A TREE ROOTED IN FAITH
A History of Queen of Angels Monastery
Copyright © 2007 Benedictine Sisters of Mount Angel. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.
isbn 13: 978-1-55635-460-1
eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7590-3
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
To the Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel, past and present, in the hope that this work will help to keep their story alive, and especially to former prioresses, Ursula Hodes and Gemma Piennett, whose decisions made it possible for me to study and nourish my love of history.
Foreword
What joy the Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel have in celebrating the 125th anniversary of their founding. What joy I have in presenting our written history by Sister Alberta Dieker, OSB.
With great care, Sister Alberta has written this important story of our monastic community, including our beginnings, expansion and growth, and the blessings of our gracious God. From construction of the early monastery in 1887 to the building of schools up and down the Willamette Valley, the sisters displayed untiring devotion to God and to His Church. The faith, hope, and love of the Benedictine sisters shine through this amazing history.
On behalf of all the sisters of Queen of Angels Monastery, I extend our deepest gratitude to Sister Alberta for her perseverance in completing the history and for giving us this record of our precious legacy. There is no one more qualified than Sister Alberta to write our community history with such first hand knowledge, scholarly study and research, and unfathomable interest.
Our monastic “tree” has been rooted in the faith and determination of our pioneer sisters and grown by courageous, self-sacrificing love. As we begin our next 125 years, we the Benedictine sisters move into our future sustained by God’s love and the powerful example of our founding sisters.
Sr. Dorothy Jean Beyer, OSB
Prioress, Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel
1987–1995, 1999–2007
106th Anniversary of the Death of Mother Bernardine Wachter, OSB
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Sister Dorothy Jean Beyer and the sisters of Queen of Angels Monastery, who have allowed me the time and space to complete this project. They have encouraged and prodded me to keep at the task. I am also grateful for those sisters who now rest in our cemetery, for they kept the records, wrote memoirs, and told me their stories, without which this account would be dry indeed. The sisters at Maria Rickenbach in Switzerland helped me find letters and relevant information. The Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Clyde, Missouri, shared valuable materials from their archives. I also made use of the archives of Mount Angel Abbey, and of St. Gertrude Monastery in Cottonwood, Idaho. Steve Ritchie, of the Benedictine Foundation of Oregon has given invaluable assistance in getting the manuscript published. Marcus Covert has given yeoman’s service as copy-editor. Sister Gertrude Feick spent many hours preparing the manuscript for the type-setter. To the numerous family members and former students who have shown interest and support for the project I am deeply indebted and offer my sincere thanks.
Introduction
The Benedictine sisters who arrived in Oregon in October of 1882 probably did not think of themselves as heroines of history, or even as participants in events that would have long-term significance. They left few records. Certainly each one played a part in her own way, with her own motives and dreams. These may have been passed on by word of mouth, but for those of us who are living a century later, they survive only in the works the women left behind, in a few letters that have been preserved, and in scattered records. Even the diaries and annals tell only of some events, leaving out personal details that would be interesting. Putting their story together is a challenging and sometimes frustrating task.
The sisters who came from Switzerland to Oregon by way of Missouri were a part of what historians today consider a mass migration of peoples from Europe to the Americas. The Land of Opportunity beckoned all kinds of Europeans for many reasons. The reasons that inspired a particular group of sisters to emigrate to the United States and to make a permanent settlement in Oregon are important to our story. A brief look at the historical background from which they came may be helpful.
The history of Western Europe in the late nineteenth century presents a mass of contradictions. Science and technology pointed to a new world of speed and efficiency, with railroad tracks and telegraph wires carrying cargo and communication to distant places at speeds unheard of a century earlier. At the same time, romantic poets and painters portrayed quiet pastoral scenes or recalled the better days of the past, when human beings were greater and more powerful than their machinery. The nineteenth century European, for the most part, looked forward to a wondrous future, and at the same time attempted to recover the past and, in some instances, to breathe life into what was already moribund.
Contradictions and their accompanying tensions were certainly present within the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had, for better or worse, thrust the institutional church into a new and uneasy position. No longer could churchmen depend upon royalty or feudal privilege for material or moral support. The diplomats who met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 could restore kings to thrones and redraw the national boundaries which Napoleon’s armies had obliterated, but they could not restore the pre-revolutionary way of life nor wipe out the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity those same armies had carried with them. Scattered bishops could return from exile or hiding, surviving monks and nuns could straggle back to what was left of their monastic buildings, but life would not be the same again. Much of the history of the Catholic Church in nineteenth century Europe is a story of struggling for position, of learning to live in a secular state and to survive in a new political world.
While this serious and not always edifying struggle was taking place on the hierarchical level, a groundswell of popular piety gave evidence that faith was still alive among the masses of Europe, both Catholic and Protestant. The need for new forms of expression and a popular revival of religious fervor was evidenced in the pietistic movement, in spiritualism, in the foundation of new preaching and teaching orders, and in an active and intense missionary movement to the unchurched peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Somehow starting anew, with Rousseau’s noble savage in mind, seemed more challenging to some devout Christians than attempting to cope with the complex religious and political issues in what seemed to be a tired and corrupt Europe.
One aspect of the renewed popular piety was a reassertion of the mystical and the miraculous, an affirmation of direct, intuitive, and emotional religious experience, in contrast to the “pure reason” of the Enlightenment. This affirmation took on many forms: new interest in traditional places of pilgrimage, creation of new shrines and saints (Lourdes in France, for example), and a heightened emphasis on adoration and contemplation, often stressed as the opposite
