NEWS STORY: Vatican pressure forces controversial abbess to step down

c. 1998 Religion News Service HARTFORD, Conn. _ Bowing to Vatican pressure, a controversial 86-year-old nun has stepped down as the head of the first Benedictine monastery for women in America and, in return, the Vatican has given withdrawn its unusual direct control of the abbey. The twin moves appear to resolve a dispute dating […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

HARTFORD, Conn. _ Bowing to Vatican pressure, a controversial 86-year-old nun has stepped down as the head of the first Benedictine monastery for women in America and, in return, the Vatican has given withdrawn its unusual direct control of the abbey.

The twin moves appear to resolve a dispute dating back more than a decade during which critics of Regina Laudis Abbey, Bethlehem, Conn., accused the leadership of the abbey of veering from Benedictine spirituality and imposing a cult-like discipline on the group of cloistered nuns and the laity associated with the abbey.


The charges swirling around the abbey drew national attention.

Under the accord reached with the Vatican, Mother Benedict Duss, who founded the Abbey of Regina Laudis in the 1940s, has turned over day-to-day administration to another nun, Mother David Serna, who had been prioress, or second in command.

The action was taken “in accordance with the wishes of Rome and with the support of her community,” according to an announcement released through the Hartford law firm of Robinson & Cole.

At the same time, the announcement said, a “delegate of the Holy See,” appointed in 1994 to oversee the abbey’s affairs after a church investigation, has been withdrawn.

“I think things are going in a much more normal way now,” said the Rev. Matthew Stark, the Benedictine monk who was the Vatican’s emissary at the abbey. Stark, 60, has returned to his own community, the Abbey of St. Gregory the Great in Portsmouth, R.I.

After years of criticism directed at the abbey, in 1991 a Vatican panel began investigating charges charges that Duss and the Rev. Francis A. Prokes, the spiritual adviser at the abbey for a quarter-century, used manipulative methods common to cults in relating to the nuns and laypeople connected with the abbey.

The panel’s report to Rome led to Prokes’ being recalled by his Jesuit community and Stark’s appointment. Prokes is reported to be currently living in a Jesuit community at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.

Under terms of the abbey-Vatican accord, Duss will retain the title of abbess emerita and be recognized as the community’s “foundress and spiritual mother,” said Edward Hennessey of Robinson & Cole, a lawyer who has represented the abbey in civil litigation.


Her successor will be elected by the 36 nuns in the community but “there are no plans to elect a successor at this time,” Hennessey said.

The Vatican probe of the abbey was requested by Archbishop John F. Whealon before he died in August 1991. It was conducted by a team led by Bishop Joseph J. Gerry of Portland, Maine, a former Benedictine abbot. A second probe was conducted by the Archdiocese of Seattle into a satellite community of the abbey on Shaw Island near Seattle.

Duss and Prokes were accused of demanding unquestioning loyalty of the nuns and laypeople associated with the abbey. The laypeople were grouped into about a dozen “closed communities,” in which they received spiritual direction.

But some former members and relatives of members said families had been torn apart, husbands and wives divorced, outsiders shunned, grown children alienated from their parents and members pressured into giving all they had to the abbey or several related enterprises.

The abbey was even cited as an example of a Catholic religious community that had fallen victim to the cult phenomenon in a 1989 book “Cults, Sects and the New Age” by the Rev. James J. LeBar, a New York priest and adviser on cults to the Vatican.

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Hennessey, the abbey lawyer, said such criticism is no longer valid.

“There was a corps of people who were very negative but most of the criticism seems very outdated now,” he said.


Hennessey also disputed that Starks was an”overseer”at the abbey. Rather, the lawyer said, Stark served “as the abbey’s delegate with the particular mission of helping the abbey dialogue with Rome”in order to rebut rumors circulated by persons attacking the abbey.

But Stark had a different view of his Vatican-assigned role. Church authorities, he said, “felt it would be a good thing to have someone who was a Benedictine himself to oversee the life of the monastery.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Established as the first Benedictine monastery for women in America, the abbey was founded following World War II by Duss, an American, and Mother Mary Aline Trilles de Warren, a French woman. They had spent the war in an abbey in France.

Set in the sylvan hills of Litchfield County, Conn., Regina Laudis became widely known soon after its founding. It drew on a deep well of goodwill, boosted by favorable media attention, including a 1949 movie,”Come to the Stable,”that often turns up on television at Christmastime. Most recently the nuns have received attention with the production of an album of Gregorian chant that has proven popular.

Abbeys are relatively autonomous in the Catholic Church. They are under the charge of the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. Local bishops _ the archbishop of Hartford in Regina Laudis’ case _ have only limited jurisdiction over abbeys.

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