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Except for the scattered handful of Carthusian houses, all Latin-rite monasteries in the world follow—with varying degrees of severity—the rule of conduct that St. Benedict of Nursia wrote down in 529 for his community of cenobites at Monte Cassino in Italy. Although faithful to this spirit, U.S. monasteries have nonetheless made some striking adaptations of Benedictine life to suit American ways. More active and outgoing than their European counterparts, U.S. monasteries operate everything from mailorder cheese businesses to country missions to diocesan seminaries; each Sunday their monks say Mass in hundreds of U.S. churches. "The fundamental difference," says Father Rembert Weakland of St. Vincent's Archabbey, "is that in Europe the people go to the monastery. In the U.S. the monastery goes out to the people."
U.S. monasteries will try almost anything that seems likely to help provide for the time and opportunity to pray. Famed since the 12th century for their farming prowess, the Trappists have added new luster to the order's reputation through the assortment of cheese, jams, breads and cured hams they sell to supermarkets. Better known as teachers than farmers, U.S. Benedictines operate more than 50 seminaries, colleges and high schools, many (such as the Portsmouth Priory School near Newport, R.I.) with national reputations. Monasteries make ends meet through a variety of self-sustaining work: one abbey in Indiana has its own coal mine; St. Vincent's bakes its own bread; individual monks are expert at almost everything from nuclear physics to organ music.
Most of the established U.S. monasteries are deeply engaged in missionary work, both in the U.S. and abroad. Minnesota's Abbey of St. John in Collegeville—the largest Benedictine monastery in the world, with more than 390 monks—supervises six dependent priories, serves 34 U.S. parishes, conducts missions in Tokyo, Mexico City and the Bahamas.
With the Times. As far as piety permits, U.S. monks have kept well up with the times, hired the best of U.S. architects (Philip Johnson at St. Anselm's, Marcel Breuer at St. John's) to design new churches and cloisters. The Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Genesee near Rochester, N.Y., has its own fallout shelter and volunteer fire department. St. Vincent's runs its own radio station, probably is the only U.S. monastery to have a monk with the official title of public relations director. In the interests of modern efficiency, North Carolina's Belmont Abbey has forsworn some customary monastic pursuits: 15 years ago, all of Belmont's cooking and shoemaking was done by monks; now they have found it cheaper to farm the work out to local tradesmen. Even the work-minded monks of the New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur, Calif., agreed to forswear tradition and let secular hands tackle the job of cell building. "We were given bricks to build our houses," says Dom Pedro Rebello sorrowfully, "but everything ended in a chaos of mortar and rubble."