FATHER BERNARDINE AND THE ROTARY

Last year Father Bernardine Ness was elected president of the Rotary Club in Coban, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala.  His activity in Rotary has given him an exciting connection between the needs of Guatemalans and generous benefactors of Rotary International. The organization, linked to 165 Rotary clubs in the United States, has, over the past few years, placed textbooks in Guatemalan high schools.  Up until then, teachers dictated to the students or had them copy what had been written on the blackboard.  The Coban Rotarians with assistance from International Rotary purchased textbooks amounting to $300,000.  The students rent the books at about a quarter of the wholesale price.  This permits the replacement of books every four years.  The textbooks have been provided to schools in various sections of the country, allowing the students the use of books for the first time in their lives. 

A group of Rotarians from Winnipeg, Manitoba came to Coban looking for a needy school to adopt and turn into a model school.  Father Pedro Choc, who has the pastoral responsibility for seventy villages, designated Yalchacti as one of the most needy.  Eighty children attended a small wooden school of two rooms in a jungle about fifty kilometers from Coban.  After meeting with the villagers, an alliance was formed to help that school so it would become a model for others.  The Rotarians provide funds for the construction of four more classrooms, a kitchen, latrine, and an administrative office.

Taking advantage of the dry season to begin construction proved a challenge.  The village had no sand, and water had to be hauled every day to make cement. Before this could be done the jungle had to be cleared.  Fifty-seven men with machetes grew discouraged by the small clearance they had made.  Father Bernardine asked the mayor of Coban if he

could arrange having the sand hauled fifty kilometers to the village, and provide a bulldozer for four days to clear out the rest of the jungle area.  The day the bulldozer arrived, the villagers called it “the machine of 1000 men.”  Everyone came to watch the clearing of the land and the formation of a small football field.  At the ceremony of laying the first brick, a friend of Father Bernardine’s in community development donated 200 sacks of cement, 3000 pounds of steel bars, and the tin roof.

  Clearing the land

Because there was no electricity available, a solar panel was installed with a battery to power the projection of educational videos.  A satellite antenna and connection with educational programs is in the works now.

During the dry season in Alta Verapaz, the people in some areas have to walk seventeen kilometers for water.  They put garbage bags in gunnysacks to carry the water on their backs. Father Bernardine asked Rotarty members of his hometown, Wayzata, Minnesota, and nearby Minnetonka, to provide 100 plastic 400-gallon water tanks.  A hundred families can use the tanks to capture water during the rainy season that is about ten months out of the year.

Another project that has Father Bernardine’s interest is one related to health.  Encouraging people to use folic acid will eliminate a high percentage of birth defects.  Guatemala has many cases of spina bifida, a defect formed in the spinal column during the first twenty-eight days of pregnancy.  The Coban Rotary Club has been active in the production of  videos to make people aware of this “miracle” vitamin that also prevents cleft palate and has recently been highlighted as possibly preventing Down syndrome.  The Foundation for Spinal Bifida in Guatemala is studying the link between corn mold and the blockage of the absorption of folic acid.  The mold forms when people bend down the corn ears to let them dry on the stalks, but moisture forms a habitat ideal for the formation of corn mold.

The promotion of folic acid use, the water tanks, the model school, and the textbooks are all projects that the Rotary Club and the Benedictines of Resurrection Priory share in common. The monks have an outreach that extends to both urban and rural parishes.  Within these parishes there are a number of spiritual movements: Cursillo, Charismatic Renewal, New Catechumens, and the Legion of Mary.  The people are committed to the daily operations of their parishes and many serve as catechists.

Resurrection Priory

The St. Benedict Center has about 130 leaders who gather every weekend to study economics.  People are being trained there in medical care for the people of their villages. The priory provides scholarships to needy students who attend school in Coban. 

“All these activities are the product of a Benedictine way of life,” Father Bernardine says. “Our community life frees individuals to do work in their own areas of responsibility, helping with our real goal to establish a vibrant native Guatemalan community.  We have been in Guatemala since 1964, and have seen the generous response of the people to try and help one another to live better lives.

“Today there are only three priests from Blue Cloud Abbey in the priory.  We have two Q’eqchi Indian priests with one Q’eqchi brother waiting to be ordained a deacon.  The other twelve monks are also native Guatemalans, and will be carrying on when we turn the monastery over to them."

The Monks of Resurrection Priory

Fr Bernardine, back row 1^st person on left

On August 5^th, 2005, the Feast of Our Lady of the Snow, the patronal feast of Blue Cloud Abbey, our confrere, Brother Rene Wilson died at St. William’s Home in Milbank, South Dakota.  A few short weeks before his death, he had had surgery to remove a tumor from his brain.  Back at the abbey, he suffered seizures and injured himself in a fall.  This necessitated his going to the nursing home.

Brother Rene was born in Maryville, Missouri on December 28, 1937.   He became a Catholic at the age of eleven.  Following his graduation from high school in St. Joseph, Missouri, Brother Rene attended Conception Seminary for two years and then went back home to St. Joseph where he worked in a drug store while attending St. Joseph Junior College.  Friends from Nebraska told him about Blue Cloud Abbey.  He visited here in 1959 and entered our community that same year.   He professed vows on February 10, 1961.

During the construction era at Blue Cloud Abbey, Brother Rene worked on the crew.  He also learned barbering while a junior monk.  One day when he was cutting Abbot Gilbert’s hair, Brother Rene was informed that he was going to be sent to nursing school.  “Are you afraid of blood?” Abbot Gilbert asked.  In 1966, Brother Rene graduated from the Alexian Brothers School of Nursing in Chicago.

He was our infirmarian as well as wearing many other hats in the community.  During his monastic lifetime, he had been treasurer, procurator, maintenance director, baker, house prefect, vestiarius, and cook.  Brother Rene could do many things, and he did them well. He grew flowers, cared for the aviary, played the organ, and quilted in his free time.  One of his quilts won two first prizes at a local show.  The past few years he hosted a get-together at the abbey for other quilters.  Genealogy was something else to which he dedicated a lot of his time, having claimed that he could trace his back to Charlemagne. 

Brother Rene had undergone gastric bypass surgery this past spring, and was making a good recovery from it.  The appearance of the brain tumor and the prognosis came as a terrible shock to all of us.  Our confrere, these past few weeks, was indeed “hastening” toward his heavenly home.

His funeral and burial were at Blue Cloud Abbey on August 9th.  May he rest in peace.

PHOTO PROJECT

    The American Indian Culture Research Center is establishing a digital library and long term archive to preserve and share unique historical photography depicting Native American historical events and cultural change from the late 1800s to present day.  Blue Cloud Abbey has in its possession thousands of photographs in the form of glass plates, lantern slides, newspaper print block, and conventional photographic prints.  Collected over more than a hundred years, many of these photographs represent trusted donations by tribal people to Blue Cloud Abbey intended as a way to preserve the Northern Great Plains Indian heritage.

Monks at Blue Cloud will oversee this research.  It is their hope that eventually Native American tribal college student interns will search through the inventory and help research the stories behind the photographs.

This project is the outgrowth of the initial restoration of photographs by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation System (EROS) Data Center near Sioux Falls.  Some of these photographs were displayed in a variety of public and private publications and 2004 exhibits.  A special public showing was at the U.S. Senate Russell Building Rotunda in Washington, D.C.  Father Stanislaus Maudlin (shown here with some of the photographs) is the Executive Director of the American Indian Culture Research Center.

The sign announcing “Corn Day” appeared on the boardseveral times in August.  We were able to freeze 53 gallons of corn this year.  Meanwhile, Abbot Alan Berndt was picking apples in our orchard.

BITS OF MONASTIC NEWS

Father Basil Dilger, the Prior of our foundation in Guatemala, was home for a vacation and also attended the General Chapter of the Swiss-American Congregation along with Abbot Thomas and Brother Benet Tvedten who was Blue Cloud’s elected delegate.  Father Basil gave a report on the activities at Resurrection Priory.  Reports from the other Swiss-American monasteries in Central America and Mexico were also presented.

For some people Swiss-American may connote the name of a cheese.  For us monks, it is the name of the congregation of 18 monasteries to which Blue Cloud Abbey belongs.  All of these monastic houses can trace their European lineage to either the Abbeys of Einsiedeln or Engleberg in Switzerland.  Having this in common, however, does not mean that we are uniform in everything else.  There is a great amount of diversity among the monasteries in the Swiss-American Congregation.  Some monasteries operate seminaries; others run high schools.  Most of them have facilities for retreats.  For some communities tending to a retreat house is the exclusive monastic work. Several of the monasteries have presses, two of them are widely known because of their mail order business.  The liturgy is celebrated in the vernacular at most places, but two monasteries use Latin.

Now the Swiss-American Congregation is branching out to Latin America.  And at this 2005 General Chapter, the Congregation returned to Europe by accepting a newly formed monastery in Norcia, St. Benedict’s hometown in Umbria. All the monks of the small community are from the United States except for one member who is Colombian.

Two of our oblates, Ginny Cheek of Sioux Falls and Greg Gits of Bemidji, Minnesota, attended the Biennial Meeting of Oblate Directors and Oblates at Sacred Heart Monastery inYankton, South Dakota this summer. Blue Cloud Abbey has over 300 oblates affiliated with it. They are increasing while vowed members of the community are decreasing.  We welcome more members in both instances.