Our Lady of Calvary Abbey / Abbaye Notre Dame du Calvaire

About Us

Is the Christian monastic life for you? Is Jesus calling you to a form of the religious life that is monastic and contemplative? As religious we live the life of the evangelical counsels. Our monastery, Our Lady of Calvary Abbey, (Abbaye Notre Dame du Calvaire) is a community of men living the Cistercian/ Trappist vocation. Prayer, liturgical and personal, manual work, and spiritual reading (lectio divina) are the characteristic activities of our daily life.

The Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, OCSO to which our community belong was founded at the end of the eleventh century, as an attempt to return to the purity of monastic life according to the Rule of Saint Benedict, with a special emphasis on solitude and poverty. A new reform emphasized manual work and austerity in the seventeenth century, this gave rise to the Trappist version of our life, named after the monastery of La Trappe, in France, where it began. While, perhaps, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux is the best-known Cistercian, our three founders were saints Robert, Alberic and Stephen Harding, who began the monastery of Citeaux in France in 1098. From 1902 until the present time monks have lived, prayed, and worked on the present site of the monastery in Rogersville, New Brunswick Canada. We are a Bi-lingual community of French and English.

In the third and fourth century deserts of Egypt, on the sunny hills of Italy in the sixth century, all over Medieval Europe, monks and nuns have prayed, studied, and worked together in joyful hope of the peace of the life of the world to come. The monks try to follow the well-tested guidance of the Rule of Saint Benedict. This Rule has shaped generations of God- seekers on all the continents and in the face of many historical circumstances.

One great challenge of the Cistercian life is certainly its simplicity, a first requirement for truth. This quality characterizes the life of the monk and its environment. Architecture, decor, liturgy which is the staple of the monk’s daily life, as well as the programme of the ordinary day, all are marked by simplicity, be- cause the God who is being sought is simple, the One God. The monk is engaged in re-establishing this unity within himself, as a first stage, because he recognizes that the divisions that the world and every human being suffer from have their origins in his own heart. This search for unity is why a man becomes a monk, from the Greek monos meaning one or alone with God. But for the Cistercian this aloneness with God is lived in community. Consider your vocation and let us be a part of your discernment process.