Carthusians

Bruno retained the congregational idea, but he tried to unite it with the idea of the hermit life.

The Carthusians were communities of solitaries.

They had common buildings and a common rule, but each monk had his separate cell where he worked, ate, and slept, and lived in almost perpetual silence, a life of prayer and meditation.

A third order founded at Fontevraud by a Breton, Robert d'Abrissel, combined religious houses for men and women in one organization over which, in honor of the Blessed Virgin, a woman presided as abbess.

But that scared me, that I have all these names that are verifiable, except that one, and that he was intelligence.

Then on the bottom of the men were Telepath, Carthusian monk.

Telepath 2, Carthusian monk.

Carthusian monk? I Google Carthusian monk.

There is a monastery in Mount Equinox, Vermont, called the Charterhouse Transformational Monastery.

And their order is Carthusian, the Carthusian religious order.

I can't go in depth how I researched this one of the brothers, but somebody contacted me and said, we think...

Did you do it in a shady way?

right, this religious sister in the United States a couple of years ago.

You get cases of the Carthusians buried.

There are cases of occasionally God defies the rules of nature to draw our attention.

Incorruptible bodies is the same motive as any miracle in history, whether it's a message from heaven, an incorruptible body, a miraculous medical cure.

What am I going to say? What can I make out of this scripture that I'm reading that I could preach to others that is going to engage them? And certainly there's nothing wrong about that, but he says that we should really be doing Lectio Continua, that we should be reading a gospel or part of the scriptures straight through with this radical openness to what God might speak to us through a particular text that we might not be expecting or what he might communicate even within the silence.

Remember the Carthusians saying, silence allows God to speak a word that is equal to himself.

So, in a moment of silence, God can communicate something that fills us with His grace or illuminates the mind and the heart in a way that is beyond intellect, reason, and imagination.

And so, you know, I think especially in our day, in our tendency to intellectualize the faith, make it notional.

Well, all of those saints that you spoke of in October, they're all members of religious orders.

Carmelites, Bruno with the Carthusians, and all these different religious orders.

That's going to be the topic of our episode today, are the different religious orders, the differences between them.

Let's compare, contrast.

I'm jumping the gun here, but I wanted to come back to what you alluded to.

How does isolation, contemplation—let's take the Carthusians, I think, maybe as an extreme example— I understand how it might nourish the spiritual life or soul of the individual, but how does it serve the community, the church, to have, you know, a bunch of monks sitting in a cave, you know, but

how does it serve the greater community? I think every soul that is at peace and somehow has a relationship with the divine, serve the community.

You do not need to be active.

They didn't sound like that.

They didn't sound like the calm confidence of the Carthusians who says the world spins and the cross stands firm.

And they certainly didn't sound like Pius XI of blessed memory.

who wrote, we were convinced that there is no more effective way to restore and invigorate peace than to seek the restoration of the reign of Jesus Christ, Pax Christi and Regno Christi, the peace of Christ in the kingdom of Christ.

After four years in Barcelona, Anthony finally realized he needed to leave and pursue his vocation.

He wanted to become a Carthusian and live as a hermit.

Eventually, his spiritual director convinced him to study philosophy in the diocesan seminary in Vic, about 25 miles from his family home.

As a seminarian, he was able to shed his obsession for manufacturing that had plagued him for the previous four years.

Once purified and able to refocus on his prayer life, he realized that the diocesan priesthood was God's will, not the Carthusians.

He completed his studies there and was ordained a priest on June 13, 1835.

His first assignment was in his hometown, where he spent the next four years continuing his theological studies.

And this is kind of true down to today that in the Roman church, almost all monasteries are Benedictine.

Like Carthusians get a little bit of an exception.

And if you wanted to call...

Never mind, I won't say that.