the heart is drowned in the joys of a world it has never known”!
The Feast of the Nativity of Mary (8 September) was reception and profession day for many of the Sisters in Agram. Fr. Pfanner preached the sermon and afterwards joined them for supper and Evening Prayer. Then he retired to his apartment. He wrote a few more letters to his loved ones and later that evening asked the mother superior for additional traveling cases. She looked at him, apprehensively: “Where are you going, Father?” He: “I leave tomorrow morning early to become a Trappist.” Thunderstruck, she cried: “Oh no! I cannot agree! Before you came, over thirty sisters suffered from scrupulosity. You helped them overcome it. But now I have to carry this heavy cross again by myself.” The good woman broke down, but he did not allow himself to be moved. Only to a friend he confided in a letter: “It is not easy to pull myself away, but I must follow my inner call. I want to live out my days in seclusion and solitude … I desire nothing more fervently than that God would accept my resolution. Please, remember me to your loved ones and pray for me that I do not waver in my resolution.”
His mother and siblings were still in the dark about his decision. His farewell letter to them is dated 8 September, 1863, like the others:
“I am leaving Agram for good. Tomorrow I travel to a Trappist Monastery in the Rhine Province in Germany. I recognize that this is God’s will for me, just as I recognized thirteen years ago that I should become a priest. My bishop in Brixen has approved of it … I have no desire for wealth, prestige or honour in this world. My only wish is to live poor and unknown for the rest of my life, if at all they can use me in the monastery. I beg you to pray for me that I may have the strength to do all that is asked of me … Farewell. Live in such a way that one day we will meet again in heaven! My brothers and sisters, support our old mother. Ease the burden of her responsibility for the family by rendering her obedience.”
Serious and Humorous Thoughts
By Francis Wendelin Pfanner
The principle I followed when I was in school was to do all my assignments, but not a thing more than was required!
Pride and foolishness belong together and are hatched by the same hen. As long as the world lasts there will be foolish and ignorant people.
The sinister fellow is not the one who looks for light and enlightenment in the dark, but the stay-at-home who, too lazy to think, does nothing but roar from the dark.
If the heart is at peace it is easy to pray. Look at the water. When its surface is calm, you can look through it and count every pebble on the floor.
It is an art to live in a religious community and rub off your shortcomings and rough edges on the shortcomings and rough edges of others.
IV.
Mariawald Monastery
Praying and Working with Silent Monks
Fr. Pfanner traveled to Cologne via Vienna. At Wuerzburg he looked up his “secretary of pilgrim days”, while in Cologne he waited impatiently for his connection to Heimbach, the station closest to Mariawald:
“For three long hours I sat in the cathedral, but this time I had no eyes at all for the gorgeous stain glass windows or the gothic architecture, which fourteen years earlier had cast such a spell over me. ‘Why should I?’ I told myself; ‘it’s pure vanity! Once in the monastery, I cannot share what I have seen with anyone’.”
Climbing for an hour through a gorgeous beech wood he arrived at Mariawald. The monastery had been secularized in 1802 and the monks expelled. Two years before he knocked on its door Trappists from Oelenberg in the Alsace had resettled it (1861), but the actual work of reconstruction had only just then begun.
Abbot Francis:
“The beautiful Gothic church had no roof, windows or doors; even the iron bars had been broken out of the ashlars and carried off. The miraculous picture of Our Lady had been transferred to the parish church of Heimbach, where it was preserved in a separate chapel. The beautiful Gothic windows ended up in a museum in England and the monastery buildings had served as a quarry for anyone who needed stones. – The farmland was extremely poor and rocky and there was hardly enough level ground to build on.”
When Fr. Pfanner arrived on 10 September, 1863, Mariawald numbered not quite twenty monks. At thirty-three years of age the Prior was five years his junior. He was away in France attending the annual Trappist general chapter. Until his return the candidate was put up in the guest quarters. Six weeks later, on 9 October, the feast of St. Abraham, he was given the habit of the Reformed Cistercians and a new name. As Fr. Franciscus (after the Poverello of Assisi) he became a member of the Trappist Congregation of de Rancé.
His life was now ordered by the rule with its daily schedule of ora et labora.
Abbot Francis:
“My first assignment was to weed the garden. So I had to bend a lot. It was something my back did not like, but since no one asked me how I felt, I carried on, telling myself that in due time I would be given another occupation. I was mistaken. Instead, I realized that all that was expected of me was to help rebuild Mariawald … Time passed quickly. As I became better acquainted with the life of a novice and entered more deeply into the meaning of the Trappist vocation, things became easier. I even started to doubt if after all this was the life of penance I was looking for.”
To an extent, it was. In mid-18th century Mariawald was certainly not a place of bliss. What annoyed the beginner (novice) was that the study of the Psalms (by Bellarmin) was constantly interrupted by a rigid schedule of prayer and work. He got on well in community but not with everybody:
“One of the older monks who wanted to try me out was known to be difficult. He did not want to see me going flat out, because for him, who used his many private prayers as an excuse for not doing his chores, manual labour was an evil he shunned any time. It did not take me long to figure him out. He was not really a Trappist but what you would call a holy Joe. Himself neglecting his share of the work, he made sure others got more than they could cope with. For example, when we were repairing the roof he put so many slabs in my basket that not even two men could lift it. I carried it up a few times and would have continued doing so if my superior had ordered me to, but I also knew that it was against our rule to carry or assign too heavy burdens.”
Fr. Francis worked with a will. Work was a pleasure for him. Before he knew it he had regained his former strength and felt better than ever before. The ascetic lifestyle – frugal diet and hard labour in the fresh air – had an invigorating effect. He did not wish for a change. To his family he wrote that though he had no mirror to look at himself he could feel his cheeks bulging out. He was busy the whole day, either chopping wood for torches or cutting and uprooting thorns: in short, cultivating barren ground. It was the kind of work that agreed with him, and it did not matter that his hands “like the hands of a farmer” were full of calluses and cracks. Rather, he must thank his father for teaching him early in life how to work with wood and soil.
His former parishioners insisted on his return to Haselstauden. He did not think of it. Instead, he wrote to his bishop that he would renounce his benefice immediately after profession.8 So fully was he committed to the monastic life that once he had pronounced his simple vows, on 21 November 1864, he was appointed Sub-Prior.9
Daily Striving for Perfection
The monastic regimen is not soft on a man. The Mariawald community rose at a time when most other people are still asleep: at 2 a. m. on weekdays and 1 a. m. on Sundays and Holy Days.
