Mount St. Benedict, an Abbey Built by Monks Fleeing Brazil

Dom Mayeul de Caigny governed the Abbey of Sao Sebastiao in Bahia, Brazil, at a moment when Brazil's religious orders had reason to be nervous, and in October 1911 he wrote to the Archbishop of Port of Spain asking whether Trinidad might take in some of his monks against the threat of persecution he saw building around his community. That single defensive letter is the entire founding document of what became Mount St. Benedict: within a year, in October 1912, Benedictine monks from Bahia had relocated to a ridge above what is now Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region and begun building a monastery on land that would eventually total some two hundred forty acres. The choice of name, the Abbey of Our Lady of Exile, keeps that origin visible rather than smoothing it into an ordinary founding story; this was a community that understood itself, from its first year, as displaced. What the monks built once they arrived followed the same Rule of Saint Benedict that governs Benedictine houses everywhere, ora et labora, prayer and work structuring the daily rhythm, but the community they founded did not stay narrowly enclosed. Mount St. Benedict became, and remains, a retreat and guesthouse that welcomes visitors regardless of faith, and it acquired along the way a distinctly local reputation, a Trinidadian folk belief that the mountain air itself carries healing properties, drawing visitors whose interest in the abbey has nothing to do with Catholic devotion at all. More than a century after that anxious letter from Bahia, Mount St. Benedict stands as the oldest monastery in the Caribbean, a status it holds not because it was the region's first attempt at monastic life but because its own survival, across a century that saw plenty of Caribbean religious institutions falter, has simply outlasted every rival founding.