Trappists (Cistercians of the Strict Observance)

The Trappists are the strictest branch of the Cistercian family, and they exist because one seventeenth-century abbot pressed the ideal of austere observance to its limit.

The reform of La Trappe

The common name attaches to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, which grew from the reform imposed by Armand-Jean de Rance on the abbey of La Trappe in Normandy from the 1660s. Rance restored a severe regime of manual labour, penance, plain diet and near-total silence, reacting against what he judged the laxity of the Cistercians of his day. The life is contemplative and enclosed, ordered by the round of communal prayer and work under the ancient motto of prayer and labour, and the reputation of the Trappists for silence, though the popular idea of an absolute vow of silence is a simplification, reflects the real restriction of unnecessary speech.

A separate order

The strict-observance houses were formally constituted as a distinct order in 1892, separating from the common-observance Cistercians. The Trappists have remained a small and rigorous body, known in the wider world through the writings of members such as Thomas Merton and, incidentally, through the beer and produce by which many abbeys support themselves. They stand at the austere end of a long series of reforms, the Cistercian correction of the Benedictines and the Trappist correction of the Cistercians, each a return toward a simplicity the previous generation was felt to have lost.

Armand Jean de Rance's reform at La Trappe from 1664 was controversial from the moment it began, and not only among outsiders: fellow Cistercian abbots argued that his added austerities, near total silence, harsh manual labour, and a penitential severity going beyond what the Rule of Saint Benedict itself required, exceeded legitimate reform and amounted to an invented rigor of de Rance's own devising. The reform nonetheless spread to other houses that adopted La Trappe's observance, and it was tested severely within a few generations of its founding, when the French Revolution suppressed French monasteries outright in the 1790s and scattered the Trappist communities into exile.

A monk named Augustin de Lestrange led a group of the displaced community across Switzerland, Germany and eventually into Russia and beyond over the following two decades, keeping the observance alive in exile until conditions allowed a return to France. The various Trappist congregations that had multiplied and drifted apart during this period of exile and dispersal were not reunited into a single order until 1892, when Pope Leo XIII combined them into the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, giving a reform that had begun as one abbot's personal severity its eventual, formal, unified institutional shape.