New Camaldoli Hermitage

While the number of monks and nuns has declined in recent years, there has been a large increase in the number of lay people who want to associate with religious communities and their approach to spiritual life. Correspondent Kate Olson visited the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, California, where today there are 24 monks but 700 oblates, people who live in the world and affiliate with the monastery community, following a rule that guides monastic life. “We’re going back to where it all began,” says Fr. Columba Stewart, a scholar of monasticism and a Benedictine monk at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, “with a variety of models of Christian ascetic life, and by ascetic I just mean disciplined. That’s what people are discovering, and they’re figuring out ways they can live as individuals, as families, as loose associations of friends who find this particular path to be helpful, sustaining, and nourishing to them.”

Support for this story provided by George Family Foundation