CORTONA

Report to the General Chapter 2005

At the time of the 1998 celebrations, the Abbot General encouraged our communities to form friendly relationships with the monasteries of the Cistercian Order. It is in that perspective that we came into contact with the Monastery of Cortona, which is situated in our area and which had some relationship with our monastery in the past. I visited this monastery in January of 1997, accompanied by Sr. Luciana, who was then prioress of the community of Valserena. We had a good meeting and came away with a positive impression in spite of the precarious state of the community. The sisters asked us straight away if we would be able to help them. We therefore took a few steps in that direction, but we had to stop on account of certain juridical impossibilities, and in the end the project was dropped in the year 2000. It was the Bishop of Arezzo who quite unexpectedly reinitiated the matter by calling me by telephone in October 2004.

I learned afterwards that his request arose from the concern of the townspeople of Cortona, who did not want to see the monastery closed and turned into a hotel. Cortona is an important spiritual center to which many people come on pilgrimage. It is also a picturesque town with many artistic treasures. In recent times, many religious communities have closed their convents or monasteries, which then became part of the hotel business. The monastery of the Cistercian nuns is located in an area that remains a sacred neighborhood, along with a small convent of Dominican sisters and a prestigious monastery of Poor Clares. The Cistercian nuns there are very faithful to their life and enjoy the esteem and respect of the people of Cortona.

The bishop and I agreed that he could come present his request to the community. In the meantime, however, with the return of Sr. Marita and Sr. Marta, I saw that I needed to give priority to their project. When I contacted the bishop again, he said he was willing to wait but was not willing to give up. Once we had examined the Syrian project and come to a decision about it, the bishop came to meet with the community on Monday of Holy Week, April 5, 2004, to make his request. The following day, at a community meeting, I expressed my openness to this project, and explained that it had been set aside while we were deciding about Syria. I also explained that Sr. Luciana was willing to undertake the project and that I had put her in charge of it. At the same time I asked for the community’s prayers, and said that if three volunteers presented themselves it would be a sign that God was blessing this initiative. I had told the bishop that it would take at least five miracles to bring this project off, and now the first of these miracles had already happened, since three sisters came forward as volunteers, even though later on only one of them could actually leave for Cortona.

On June 10 and 11 we had two dialogues at which the community showed its openness to the project.

On June 1, 2004, accompanied by the Procurator General, I met the Secretary of the Congregation for Religious, Msgr. Nesti, whom the Bishop of Arezzo had already informed of the project. On July 20, we received a letter from him inviting the abbesses of the two monasteries to draft a statute to clarify the relationship between the two monasteries, a statute that would then be submitted to the Congregation for examination and approval.

Because of the failure we had experienced earlier, I realized that this was the most delicate point, for it involved bringing the legislation of our two Religious Orders into agreement. Meanwhile, from Cortona’s side, the sisters were pressuring me: since the time of our first contact, six sisters had died, and those sisters were not the oldest of the community. At present there is one nun 55 years old and four nuns over 80. The community is sorely tried, and there is pressure on them to close the monastery. At that time, in the middle of the summer, the Father Immediate was in Africa and the Abbot General was in Japan. I therefore decided to take on the responsibility of drawing up the requested document along with the sisters of Cortona. Having submitted it to my community, I sent it on the Congregation without further delay.

It is a “pact of assistance” between the two communities. It is based on our fundamental common Law, the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Charter of Charity. This Pact is intended to be a concrete, present-day application of the Charter of Charity. We took into account the Constitutions of the Cistercian Order, our own Constitutions, and the obligations each of them entails. Finally, the Pact is placed under the guardianship of the Bishop of the diocese until the community is in a position to elect an abbess and live without outside help. On August 28 we received an encouraging answer from the Congregation, but before approving the Pact definitively, they asked us to consult the Fathers Immediate, the Abbots General, and the Bishop of the diocese. At that time we informed and consulted both the pastoral council and the community. On September 20, by a nearly unanimous vote, the community accepted to move on to the phase of concretely carrying out the project.

On October 26, 2004, we received the nihil obstat and the blessing of the Congregation. Sr. Luciana left for Cortona on December 10, and Sr. Lucia joined her on March 14. On May 25, 2005, the Pact became effective, and Sr. Luciana was appointed Prioress.

The Valserena community then entered upon a period of finding its balance again. There were trials to face and there was also a sense of fear regarding the steps already taken. The third sister we had hoped to send immediately was unable to go. We send our simply professed to Cortona in turns and wait for better days.

In addition to this report, we mention an interesting aspect of the approval from the Congregation for Religious: “On the part of this Dicastery, nothing prevents this project from being implemented according to the statutes that your communities mutually agreed to give each other.” This means that the Congregation did not give these statutes force of law by official approval as is done in the case of federations and as we had hoped it would. It only recognized that our two communities have the right to establish this Pact and act concretely according to the dispositions laid down by mutual agreement. If it is now fully within the rights of our communities to act in this way, it is justified by the fact that what was laid down is in accord with the charism of our two communities and Orders, which stem from a single monastic trunk. Thus is recognized the sui juris freedom of the two communities to act on whatever is good and opportune within the framework of their charism and of the basic texts that order their lives, in view of an essential aim.