It is with great joy and thanksgiving that we enter our 75th year as a Cistercian/Trappistine community in the United States and in the Boston Archdiocese. So much history to be celebrated!

In our more remote planning for this jubilee year, we thought of creating a sort of illustrated history. Our archivist at the time, Sister Monica Burt, came up with a title that took our breath away: "A House Built on Yes." It is the perfect lens through which we would like to view our history.

Surely the foundational yes was the one that was born in the hearts of our Trappist Brothers of Spencer, then in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, in response to the Holy Spirit's call for Cistercian nuns in the United States. We can never be grateful enough for all that the Brothers did for us from the beginning until now. They bought the property for our monastery and also a herd of Holstein dairy cows. They built the house that became our home, and even milked the cows until the founding nuns were up to it. In time, they gave the help of Brother Dominic Mihm and Brother Matthew Fitzgerald, a gift which turned out to be permanent. The Wrentham foundation was marked forever by the profound goodness of these two Brothers.

The second yes sprang from the heart of our founding house of Glencairn in County Waterford, Ireland. Even though at the time this community was only 15 years old, they opened their doors to welcome American women who wished to enter and gave them a very fine formation. Once there, the Irish nuns gave to the group of Americans gifts of loving kindness, easy approachability, and joyful docility, gifts that turned out to be a very solid foundation for the years to come.

The third yes, a very jubilant one, was that of Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston. He was delighted to receive the Cistercians from Glencairn into his diocese not only because Boston was strongly Irish but also because his own mother was born in Waterford!

What was needed next were young women to fill the building that the monks were so lovingly preparing. Once again God called, and a positive response resounded. In the years leading up to the foundation, 10 North Americans would travel to Glencairn to receive their formation, and seven of them would return to Wrentham, together with seven Irish sisters, to establish the new foundation. Four of the seven -- Sister Stephanie Vigilante, Sister Andree Payant, Sister Grace Forster, and Sister Carol Holohan (a Canadian) -- would persevere in their monastic vocation.

The joyful and hopeful yes that filled the hearts of those responsible for our beginnings was yet to be fully grounded in the yes of sacrificial love. Such a yes was called forth in two most unusual, totally unexpected and, on one level, heartbreaking events.

The first occurred seven months after the founding, when Mother Mary St. John Tighe took ill and died of a blood clot in the hospital, on May 15, 1950, at the age of 40. Mother St. John was the beloved novice director of the community, and the shock was terrific. Yet, over the years, we came to resonate with what Dom Edmund of Spencer said at that time: "This was the grain of wheat that fell into the ground and died that it might bear much fruit." Her death seems to be the deepest and surest reason for the growth of the Wrentham monastery.

The second event that brought forth a deeply sacrificial yes in all the nuns was even more unexpected, unusual, and heartbreaking. In 1955, all the Irish foundresses were asked to return to Glencairn permanently because they were so badly needed there, something recognized and requested by Dom Gabriel Sortais, the abbot general, who was there on visitation. That the Sisters would be asked to return seems not to have been in anyone's awareness. All the Sisters had been living together for close to eight years, had developed the real relational and affective bonds that make up a strong monastic community, and this news, too, came as a terrible shock.

Although the community at Wrentham was large, its members were all young. With the return to Ireland of the more experienced members, the younger sisters had to take on roles of great responsibility very early in their monastic lives. In some cases, they would keep the same positions in the monastery for many years, even decades. Such continuity could not but contribute to the stability of the Wrentham community and allow for its expansion.

And expansion did come. We made our first foundation in Iowa in 1964, our second in Arizona in 1972, and our last in Virginia in 1987. The sisterly bonds that unite our communities are a gift beyond words. We are so grateful for this as well as for all the friends of our monastery, all who have prayed with us, and supported us. We could not have done it without them!



Sister Maureen McCabe, OCSO, is a Trappistine nun and the former Abbess of the monastery of Mount St. Mary's Abbey, Wrentham.