Christoph OhlyRatzinger is one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church".Located 20 kilometers south of Vienna in the beautiful Wienerwald, the Cistercian monastery of Heiligenkreuz takes its name from the hand-sized relic of the Cross, which has been in the monastery since 1188. A monastery like any other, or maybe not? The Cistercians of Heiligenkreuz: monks like everyone else, or not? While the number of religious vocations in Europe has been declining for decades, monasteries are dissolving and religious provinces are merging, Heiligenkreuz is booming: with almost 100 monks, it has the largest number of members since its foundation in 1133. As in the past, Heiligenkreuz also "exports" monks today: in addition to Neukloster, which is very close to the monastery and belonged to Heiligenkreuz already in the 19th century, a Heiligenkreuz priory was founded in Stiepel in Bochum in the Ruhr region in 1988 and another in Neuzelle near Germany's border with Poland in 2018. How can this be explained?
We asked the abbot of the monastery, Maximilian Heim:
While the number of religious vocations has been declining in Europe for decades, Heiligenkreuz is booming. Is this perhaps explained by the deep Cistercian spirituality? Or what do you think it is due to?
The development of monasteries and religious orders in our multicultural society is often very different. It would be unfair to make comparisons, because they all deserve appreciation. Moreover, we should not think in terms of success and failure in relation to monasteries, since vocations are not an administrative matter. Ultimately, they are an undeserved grace that we cannot create ourselves. Every young man who comes to us is a call for us to give him the freedom to examine his vocation or to have it examined. That's why, in many vocation interviews, when someone asks what requirements they need to meet, I say with a wink, "That you can go!" It is important to see a possible vocation as a preference over other possibilities, because love can only grow in a free decision. Through it community life is built, and in concrete terms this means through prayer, work, spiritual reading, support and mutual coping. Those who live their religious life with authenticity infect others and act as a magnet. In fact, one of the reasons for our growth is the young face of our almost 900-year-old monastery. Whoever comes to Heiligenkreuz experiences nothing dull, but a community that has remained young with a healthy range of ages.
A typical Austrian tradition is that the religious are also parish priests. Heiligenkreuz Abbey takes care of 23 parishes in the surrounding area. How is parish ministry integrated into the monastery's operations?
The parishes have been part of the Austrian abbeys for centuries. We face the same problems as the rest of the parishes, especially with regard to pastoral work: decreasing ecclesial awareness, shrinking congregations, people leaving the church, ... It is not easy to find the right answers to these changes in the Church and society. For monks it remains a challenge to combine pastoral and community life in the monastery. The ideal I have in mind as abbot (taking care of monastic parishes mainly from the monastic centers) is only partially successful in the old monasteries with their incorporated parishes. I also see it rather problematic for Austrian abbeys that most of their priests live in the parishes and not in the abbey. This may make the first task of a monastery, i.e. the "work of God", celebrating the Liturgy of the Hours in community, more and more difficult.
However, I would never want to do without pastoral work in the parishes. It is not an obstacle, but a door to enter into contact with people in search of our time, especially through religious education. Decades ago there were still enough teachers of religious education, but today, as with other pastoral professions, the willingness of the laity to stand up for the Gospel in the Church and in the world is decreasing. Therefore, in Heiligenkreuz we receive more and more questions from school authorities as to whether, due to this shortage, we could provide even more religious education teachers. Ideally, in these troubled times, monasteries should become more and more centers of faith and missionary pastoral care.
How do you explain the attraction of Heiligenkreuz to young people?
For almost three decades now, the Youth Vigil has become the driving force of the regional youth ministry in Heiligenkreuz. Every Sacred Heart Friday, 150 to 250 enthusiastic young people gather to praise God, listen to his word, adore him in the Eucharist and reconcile with God and each other in confession. It is like a basic course in the Catholic faith that allows them to experience religious practice.
The Youth Vigil was undoubtedly also the fruit of the World Youth Days initiated by St. John Paul II. We were also helped by the missionary enthusiasm of our Father Karl Wallner OCist, who later became rector of our university and is now the national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. He recognized how necessary it is to put social media at the service of the proclamation of the faith and to establish faith networks that can grow independently.
Getting close to the young people personally remains crucial. That is why we regularly invite them to "Monasteries for a Time" (Kloster auf Zeit), with individual support. The Benedictine principle of preferring nothing to religious services is a valuable experience for many. We also offer other programs, such as the aforementioned monthly Youth Vigil, alternative New Year's Eve celebrations, Holy Week and Easter liturgies, Eucharistic adoration, rosary prayers, accompaniment of pilgrimages and sports spiritual weeks, hiking retreats... Our choral prayer in Gregorian chant is a gateway to faith and contemplation for many people, not only young people.
The Heiligenkreuz Faculty of Theology has 300 students. How important are the university and the students for Heiligenkreuz Abbey?
Teaching, research and the concrete practice of faith are always interrelated at our university of philosophy and theology ("kneeling theology"). Our university has more than 220 years of history and is naturally also nourished by exchanges with other academic institutions. In 1975, ten years after the Second Vatican Council, we opened our university to diocesan candidates for the priesthood and to students from other religious orders. The political change of 1989/90 brought more religious students and candidates for the priesthood from the former Eastern Bloc to Heiligenkreuz. Today, the interdiocesan seminary Leopoldinum welcomes European candidates for the priesthood as well as candidates from Africa, Latin America and Asia studying in Heiligenkreuz. This means that on our university campus you meet a part of the universal Church every day.
Our university is committed to the Magisterium of the Church. We regard this ecclesiastical commitment as a source of inspiration for teaching and research. It was therefore a highlight in the history of our monastery when Benedict XVI visited Heiligenkreuz and its university in 2007 as successor of St. Peter and gave us permission to baptize our university with his name: "Benedict XVI Heiligenkreuz Faculty of Theology".
The monastery is actually called "Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Cross". "The Cistercians are completely Marian," one can read on the website. How does this manifest itself in Heiligenkreuz?.
During the aforementioned papal visit in 2007, Benedict XVI said: "The Marian fire of St. Bernard of Clairvaux shines among you... Where Mary is, there is the Pentecostal stirring of the Holy Spirit, there is awakening and authentic renewal". One of the reasons why many of us enter Heiligenkreuz is our love for Our Lady. At every choir prayer we greet her with a Marian antiphon; for decades we have (voluntarily) prayed the rosary daily before the exposed Blessed Sacrament to contemplate the life of Jesus Christ through Mary's eyes. Our Marian devotion is not artificial, but has arisen from a healthy popular piety, which our Pope Francis in particular considers an important key to the faith of the Church.
What do you think of the near future, "in Heiligenkreuz and from Heiligenkreuz": can the abbey contribute to a consolidation or something like a new rise of the Church in Austria?
Monasteries in Austria have been centers of culture in our country for centuries. However, they have become so because their first task, namely worship, i.e. the worship of God, is the foundation of their work. Especially in our times of crisis, in which faith and the life of the Church according to the Gospel are increasingly fading away, living monasteries can fulfill the prophetic and missionary task of remaining or becoming oases of faith, hope and love. At the same time, they are places of education, since monasteries have always been places where religious, monastic, musical, economic and artistic education has been promoted. Today, Heiligenkreuz is also a pioneer in the online presence of the Church on the Internet thanks to the university's media campus. Here, future priests, religious and students can learn how to use the media professionally. With "Studio 1133", the Heiligenkreuz University of Applied Sciences has a contemporary media center for video and audio formats that are used for missionary purposes for the new evangelization on television, radio and the Internet.
In a changing society and a changing Church, in which ecclesiastical faith is increasingly waning, it is important to understand living monasteries, not only in Austria, but throughout the Western world, as spiritual centers and oases in the desert of a disoriented time, where the springs of faith are tapped, from which we can drink with joy. In this way, monasteries today can also become beacons of faith, which on the one hand point to our ultimate destiny, to our home with God, and on the other guide us in the midst of the fog of our time by the paschal light, the "light of Christ," which overcomes the night of death and shines for believers as the "true morning star that never sets."
The university
The Faculty of Philosophy and Theology was annexed to the monastery in 1802 or, to be more precise, it began as the monastery's school-house for internal training in the Cistercian order. It proudly bears the name "Benedict XVI" because Pope Benedict XVI - who had already visited Heiligenkreuz as a cardinal in 1988 - was there during his visit to Austria in 2007 and also awarded it the title "University of Pontifical Right". In 2015, the university building right next to the monastery was expanded into a modern university campus with the help of donations. Most of the current 300 or so students are religious and candidates for the priesthood, making the university the largest training center for priests in the German-speaking world. It is financed by donations and the professors teach without salary.
The university makes Heiligenkreuz a center of theological scholarship and priestly life. This is reflected, on the one hand, in the image of the people who attend the midday prayers of the monks or gather comfortably in the abbey courtyard: young people, seminarians, men and women religious. But there are also listeners at the altar of the hospice. And on the other hand, there is a wide variety of activities, such as specialized lectures on the theology of Pope Benedict, courses on "Theology of the Body", or seminars on metaphysics with prominent speakers.
The Vyouth'sigilia.
The Youth Vigil, the first Friday of each month, is a real "feast": an intense evening of praise, supplication, thanksgiving, rosary... and lots of lively singing. Between 150 and 200 young people, sometimes as many as 300, come to the Kreuzkirche of the monastery, where the evening begins with a piece of Gregorian chant, in Latin! Throughout the evening, the young people have the opportunity to go to confession, and lines often form in front of the confessionals. The highlight is the procession to the medieval abbey church, where there is singing, recitation of the rosary and reading of a story about a life situation of the young people, interpreted from the perspective of faith. The vigil ends with Eucharistic adoration, followed by a cozy get-together with pretzels and apple juice. Some come from more than 50 kilometers away, others stay overnight at the monastery. Adults may only attend with the express permission of the organizers, so that a truly "young" atmosphere can develop. On the Internet one can read the following: "The youth vigil is an opportunity for young people to experience the Church and the faith authentically and convincingly, and above all with other young people, so that they may come to know and love God and Jesus and find the courage to follow their own path as Christians in our time". In addition: "At the youth vigil, many have already felt the impulse of a possible spiritual vocation. Boys have fallen in love with girls and vice versa, and many marriages and families that are happy today began or deepened their relationship at the Youth Vigil".
The sensational CD "Chant - Music for Paradise".
Following St. Benedict's motto "Ora et labora" ("Pray and work"), the monks of Heiligenkreuz have been praying the Latin "choral prayer" together for almost 900 years in the form of Gregorian chant, which dates back to St. Gregory the Great (died 604). "Gregorian chant is a form of biblical meditation, a sacred music of sung prayer," says the monastery's website. Its appeal, especially for us in the 21st century, comes from the harmony between the voices and its ancient melodies, and has been recorded on the CD "Chant - Music for Paradise": like the monks of the Spanish monastery of Silos, an English music company produced a CD of Gregorian chant with the Cistercians of Heiligenkreuz in 2008. With more than 1.1 million CDs sold, platinum and gold records in several European countries, it was a great success that the monks had never expected. All proceeds were donated to Third World priests studying at Heiligenkreuz. The project brought great joy to the monastery, because the monks sing for the glory of God, but they also bring a lot of joy to people and do a lot of good. As a result, two more CDs with Gregorian chants of the monks of Heiligenkreuz were released in 2012: "Chant - Stabat Mater" and "Chant Amor et Passio".
Austria
