Order of Port Royal

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The Order of Port Royal (short: OPR ) is a Nordic Catholic Cistercian congregation . There are several branches in Germany , the USA , Poland , Cameroon and Haiti .

tradition

The order bears the name of the dissolved Port Royal des Champs monastery in France . Today's order ties in with its spiritual and theological traditions ( Cistercian spirituality and the Liturgy of the Hours , Jansenism , Gallicanism and conciliarism ) and in this way intends to revive this traditional monastic community.

The French monastery Port Royal des Champs , founded in 1204 , originally belonged to the female branch of the Cistercian order. In the 17th century, Port Royal became the center of its own spiritual movement, which, under the influence of Jansenism, claimed to represent an unadulterated Christianity lived out of inner drive and personal unpretentiousness, which trusted only in God's grace. This movement soon had many supporters in France and later also in the Netherlands, especially among intellectuals. The sisters Angélique and Agnès Arnauld , who both temporarily served as abbesses, and their brother Antoine Arnauld played a central role . Moved by their spiritual attraction, a community of men also formed who moved near the abbey as "solitaires", hermits , for certain periods of their lives . The most famous supporter of the Port Royal movement was the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal .

The Port Royal movement, however, attracted influential enemies because of its popularity and was repeatedly suspected of heresy because of its proximity to Jansenism and its advocacy of a simple life and a certain independence from a law-based piety. The conflict with Rome and the then influential Jesuit order, as well as with Louis XIV , ultimately led to the Port-Royal-des-Champs monastery being abolished in 1709 and razed to the ground in 1710. The daughter monastery Port-Royal de Paris had meanwhile been subordinated to a different management more adapted to the political line.

Yet much of the spirit of Port Royal remained alive. Many Port Royalists fled to the Archdiocese of Utrecht of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands , which fell out of favor for reasons similar to Port Royal - suspected of Jansenism - and finally due to the election of a new Archbishop of Utrecht , Cornelius Steenoven (1661– which was not confirmed by the Pope ) 1725), was separated from Rome in 1723 and its unlawful consecration the following year by the French mission bishop Dominique Varlet (1678–1742), who had not signed the papal bull Unigenitus Dei Filius .

The spirit of Port Royal finally inspired Prof. Joseph Hubert Reinkens (1821-1896), the later Old Catholic Bishop, and his brother, the Bonn pastor Wilhelm Reinkens and the spiritual philosophy professor Franz Peter Knoodt , who later became the second Vicar General of the Old Catholic Church in Germany , and other men and women from their environment in the middle of the 19th century, to seek spiritual fellowship in a life of the immediacy of God's grace and simplicity. Knoodt even wanted to acquire the dissolved Nonnenwerth monastery near Rolandseck in order to found a "new Port Royal" as a spiritual center. Only the disputes in the run-up to Vatican I split the group and ruined the communitarian plans.

History of today's convent

A group of Old Catholics reestablished the order in Hungary in 1946 and submitted to the Polish Old Catholic Church of the Mariavites . In the 50s and 60s the search for spiritual commitment and a spiritual center in the style of Port Royal came alive again for some men and women in Germany. This led to the foundation of today's community, which canonically joined the Hungarians. In 1999 a monastic convent was established in Kaufbeuren, which took the name "Order of Port Royal" (OPR). In 2002 he rented the abbey building in Leinau near Kaufbeuren. In 2004 the order decided to submit to the jurisdiction of the Catholic Bishop of Old Catholics in Germany .

In October 2010 the order separated again from the Old Catholic Church in Germany and is now again led by its own synod. The Order currently has branch monasteries and branches in Haiti, Gabon, Cameroon and the USA, some of which are part of the Anglican community . In 2010, the St. Severin Abbey moved into the building of a former radio school between Oberbeuren and Friesenried . In 2001 the monks of St. Severin set up the St. Lukas prayer room in the nearby district of Neugablonz in Kaufbeur . In October 2012 and May 2013, clergy and lay people of the Polish Catholic National Church joined the order as regular oblates .

In 2011 the Order became a member of the Nordic Catholic Church in the Union of Scranton . Thus there is church fellowship with the Polish Catholic National Church . The abbey became the first monastery to revive monastic life in the Old Catholic churches of the Union of Scranton.

In Poland, the Samarytanin Order House in Warsaw and the Neuwedell Order House joined the Order of Port Royal in 2012.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joachim Vobbe, Angela Berlis: A new Port-Royal - alt-katholisch.de, 2004 , accessed on March 15, 2016
  2. ↑ The chapel . St. Lukas Kaufbeuren website, accessed March 15, 2016
  3. ↑ Øystein Lid: Tysk kloster knyter seg til Den nordisk-katolske kyrkja . Report from Nordiskkatolsk from January 26, 2012
  4. ^ New community in Poland accepted into the Order of Port Royal . ( Memento of March 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Website of the Abbey of St. Severin and the Order of Port Royal, accessed on February 12, 2016