they don't build em like that anymore

Father Daniel Mary of Jesus Crucified is fond of saying that his Carmelite community doesn’t have a vocations shortage. Rather, it has a housing shortage.

That may begin to change when Father Daniel Mary’s Monks of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel celebrate Holy Thursday next year.

On the same day the Carmelite monks commemorate the Last Supper with a breaking of the bread, they hope to break ground on a magnificently designed French Gothic monastery.

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The Church will accommodate 150 persons in addition to the 40 monks at choir stalls. The public entrance at the front will include a cloister, a small gift shop, a coffee shop for Mystic Monk Coffee, extern quarters, a guest master’s office and rooms where monks may meet with family.

On one side of the church, plans call for an octagonal chapter cloister, where Carmelite monks traditionally profess their vows. The cloister will be surrounded by an infirmary, offices, kitchen and dining room, sacristies and library. The other side of the church will abut a novitiate wing, where novices will be formed in dogma, Carmelite traditions and the particular manner of life of the Carmelite monks of Wyoming.

To the rear of the main altar is a smaller chapel. It will be surrounded by hermitages for 40 monks. Each hermitage will feature a small plot at its rear where monks can garden and spend time in prayer.

Eight single rooms will be built for family members of the monks. Father Daniel Mary stressed that the buildings surrounding the church are modest and small.

“The church has all the beauty,” he said.

Nothing will be more austere than the other buildings in the plans — small cottages scattered about the property where some monks will live as hermits in isolation.

“The crown jewel of the whole thing is the hermits living up in those mountain ravines, totally hidden and alone with God,” Father Daniel Mary said. “St. John of the Cross said if just one soul reaches that transforming union, the highest of unions, they’re doing more for the Church and the world than all these other people out there in the acts of apostolate that are not in that state of union. They become a huge channel of grace for the world, and I think that’s very important for us to establish that way of life.”

The second phase of construction will focus on a retreat center with its own chapel. After that, a convent for 20 to 25 nuns, either from an existing Carmelite order or one to be founded by the monks. Land for the convent already has been identified, situated more than 2 miles from the monks’ monastery.