“Monasteries don’t make much sense without monks,” says Fr Richard Purcell, abbot of Mount Melleray Abbey in west Waterford.
The cleric is in reflective mood as the Cistercian abbey, near Cappoquin, closes this weekend after almost 200 years as a place of prayer and contemplation for generations of men with a spiritual calling.
The abbey, he says, is “thriving” as a place with a shop and a guest house that are both doing well.
“We are financially quite stable, but monks are at the heart of a monastery – they are what gives a monastery meaning and without them it loses its meaning,” he says.
The Cistercians voted in November to amalgamate their communities at three abbeys – Mount Melleray, Mellifont in Co Louth and Mount St Joseph in Roscrea, Co Tipperary – and to relocate to Roscrea on a temporary basis – due to falling numbers.
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Fr Richard (48), a native of Rathgar in Dublin, became the abbot of Roscrea in 2009 aged just 33. As abbot at Mount Melleray since 2017, he has witnessed the decline in vocations; there are now just six monks left in Melleray.
“It happens so gradually; you lose one person this year, one person the next, somebody might join but then you might lose two – and then you look back and go: Gosh – when I became abbot in Roscrea in 2009, we had 24 monks; eight years later, when I left, we had 12,” he says.
Fr Richard is anxious to stress that the fall-off in vocations began much further back, from the late 1950s.
Melleray was founded in 1832 by a group of 64 Irish Cistercian monks, who were forced to leave their monastery at Melleray in Brittany when the French revolution of 1830 led to the introduction of anticlerical laws. The monks sailed from France to Cobh.
Their first attempts to found a monastery led their prior, Fr Vincent Ryan, to establish a community in Rathmore, Co Kerry, but in 1832 he was offered 600 acres of mountain scrub land at Strahan near Cappoquin by a wealthy local landowner, Richard Keane.
What followed was an extraordinary display of lay devotion when up to 10,000 men, women and children from surrounding parishes helped clear the site.
The first monastery opened in 1833 and the numbers of clerics grew, particularly following the construction almost 100 years later of the current building, an impressive Gothic revival-style edifice built from limestone from Mitchelstown Castle after it was burnt by anti-Treaty IRA republicans in the Civil War.
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The new monastery, with its square belfry soaring high against the furze and ferns of the Knockmealdown mountains, became home to hundreds of monks over the years. In the 1950s the numbers topped 150 priests and brothers. The numbers joining rose from five or six a year in the 1920s and 1930s to 10 to 20 a year in the 1940s and 1950s.
“People thought the vocation boom, if you want to call it that, would never end but numbers began to taper off in the late 1950s,” says Fr Richard.
The dwindling community of monks at Melleray and the other Cistercian monasteries is best illustrated at the liturgy – prayers and psalms around which the monks build their daily lives.
On Wednesday just four of the 34 beautifully carved wooden stalls in the bright airy church were occupied during prayers as two of the six monks were away.
Fr Richard was joined in the liturgy by Fr Eamon Fitzgerald and Fr Donal Davis in singing the psalms while Fr John Dineen played the organ. Fr John (57) from Waterford city, best captures the decline in numbers as he later chatted about the monastery. He recalls a busy past with almost 60 monks at the monastery when he arrived in 1991.
“The place was buzzing – the Cistercian monastic life is prayer, work study and manual labour, and everyone was involved in the farm,” he says.
Fr John says, “At one time there were milking cows and sheep and pigs and poultry here on the farm. And all those buildings up there were workshops, you had a carpenter’s workshop, a forge – it was a buzz of activity”, pointing to an enclosed courtyard of buildings behind the monastery.
Each is shut and silent.
The farm is now leased to a neighbouring farmer, while the monks hire contractors to fell trees from its extensive forestry. The monastery’s apiary, which once yielded an abundance of heather honey, has also disappeared, its hives long dismantled and the bees long gone.
Now the monks too are about to depart the monastery, with its doors closing for the final time today. Fr Richard feels a sadness not just for his fellow monks but for the eight staff who work in the shop and guest house and on the grounds, but he says the closure was inevitable. The monks have been “stretched” trying to “keep things going”.
“This is a very conscious decision that has been made by the three communities ... who are all experiencing the same things in different ways,” he says.
That sadness is shared by one of his predecessors, Fr Eamon Fitzgerald (79), a Dubliner from Dundrum, who joined the Cistercians in 1966 and served as abbot in Melleray from 1989 to 2008.
He returned in 2022 after spending 14 years in Rome as abbot general of the order.
“We could see it coming; the numbers have been declining for a number of years, and the other night at prayers, I shed a tear or two at the realisation we would be gone in a few days,” he says.
“It will be deeply sad and we will all feel a great sense of loss.”
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