The EWTN News article reports that the Trappist monks of the Abbey of Our Lady of La Trappe in Normandy, France, are considering abandoning their monastery after nearly 900 years due to a shortage of vocations and economic burdens. The article quotes “Bishop” Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, who laments this as a sign of “ideological secularism that is rotting the soul of the West” and calls for prayers to preserve the abbey. This narrative, while superficially mournful, is a textbook example of modernist clericalism that reduces a supernatural crisis to a naturalistic problem of demographics and sentiment, thereby whitewashing the apostasy of the post-conciliar sect and offering no remedy consonant with Catholic doctrine.
The Naturalistic Reduction of a Supernatural Crisis
The article frames the potential abandonment of a historic monastery primarily in terms of “vocations” as a human resource shortage and “economic burden.” This is a profound naturalistic fallacy. The crisis is not a lack of candidates for a monastic lifestyle but the collapse of Catholic faith and practice in the lands that were once the heart of Christendom. The article quotes Barron stating the abbey “has survived the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, and the world wars,” yet cannot survive the present. He correctly identifies the cause as “ideological secularism,” but this diagnosis is deliberately shallow and omits the essential truth: this secularism is the direct fruit of the modernist apostasy condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis and Lamentabili sane exitu.
The modernist, by his very nature, “reduces the supernatural to the natural,” as the Holy Office’s decree states. Barron’s analysis is a perfect specimen of this error. He speaks of “spiritual disaster” without defining sin, grace, or the state of mortal soul. He mourns a building’s potential loss while remaining silent on the loss of souls to heresy, schism, and idolatry within the very structures occupying the Vatican. This silence is the gravest accusation. The pre-conciliar Church would have identified the primary danger not as vague “secularism” but as the systematic rejection of the Social Kingship of Christ proclaimed in Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (condemning propositions 77-80 on the separation of Church and State, religious liberty) and the positive doctrine of Pius XI’s Quas Primas.
The Omission of Christ the King: The Core of the Apostasy
Barron’s lament is utterly devoid of the central, non-negotiable Catholic doctrine that the potential loss of the abbey truly signifies: the public and social rejection of Christus Rex. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, established the feast of Christ the King precisely as a remedy against the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism.” He wrote that this plague began “with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations” and led to the subordination of divine religion to secular power. The Pope declared that the kingdom of Christ “encompasses all men” and that rulers have the duty to publicly honor and obey Christ, ordering all state relations on the basis of God’s commandments.
Where is this doctrine in Barron’s commentary? Nowhere. His solution is vague prayer, not the militant, public confession of Christ’s rights over individuals, families, and states. This omission is not accidental; it is doctrinal. The conciliar sect, with its endorsement of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae) and its focus on a “spiritual” kingdom disconnected from public law, has excommunicated itself from the Catholic doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ. Barron, as a high-ranking member of this sect, cannot preach what his masters have condemned. His silence on the necessity of the state recognizing the Catholic religion as the sole religion of the State (Syllabus, Error 77) is a silent admission of his allegiance to the apostate “Church of the New Advent.”
The False Problem of “Vocations” and the Real Problem of Sacramental Validity
The article treats “vocations” as a quantitative problem. This is a monstrous deception. The true problem is qualitative: the sacramental and doctrinal integrity of the post-conciliar “clergy” and “religious” is suspect. The “vocations” to the conciliar sect are often to a life that simulates but fundamentally distorts the monastic ideal. The Rule of St. Benedict, which the Trappists claim to follow, is impossible to live authentically in communion with a hierarchy that propagates modernist errors (see Lamentabili sane exitu condemnations on the evolution of dogma and the sacraments).
Furthermore, the very concept of a “vocation” in the old sense—a clear, supernatural call to the perfection of charity in a specific state of life—presupposes a Church that preaches the Faith without error and administers the sacraments validly and licitly. The current “Church” is a paramasonic structure whose bishops and “popes” are manifest heretics (see the sedevacantist argument from Bellarmine and Canon 188.4). A “vocation” to such a communion is a vocation to apostasy. The article’s premise that the community of 20 brothers is a genuine Catholic community is therefore false. They are, at best, souls in peril within a schismatic body; at worst, accomplices in the ongoing revolution.
The Symptomatic Role of the Modernist Cleric
“Bishop” Robert Barron is a prime example of the “clergy” guilty of the apostasy Pius IX denounced. He uses Catholic terminology—”spiritual disaster,” “prayer,” “abbey”—to create a facade of continuity while emptying it of its supernatural content. His is the language of the hermeneutics of continuity, which Pope St. Pius X called “the synthesis of all errors.” Barron speaks of the West’s “rotting soul” but never names the poison: Modernism, which “rejects the absolute and immutable character of the Sacred Books” and makes dogma a human, evolving product (Lamentabili, Props. 54, 58).
His call to “prayer so that the monks might find a way to preserve their great abbey” is a counsel of despair disguised as piety. It asks God to intervene in a human logistical problem while refusing to name the sin that provokes God’s chastisement: the public, official rejection of His laws by the very men who occupy the sees of the Apostles. True Catholic prayer, as taught by the Church, always includes the condition of doing God’s will, which includes the defense of His rights. Barron’s prayer is inert because it is separated from the duty to cry out against the apostate hierarchy and to uphold the immutable Faith. He would rather see a beautiful abbey preserved in the service of a false religion than see it emptied as a prophetic sign against the abomination.
The True Catholic Response: Christ the King or Nothing
The authentic Catholic response to this crisis is not Barron’s sentimental preservationism but the uncompromising program of Pius XI in Quas Primas: the public and solemn recognition of the Social Kingship of Christ. The Pope wrote that the feast of Christ the King was instituted “to remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him.” The preservation of any abbey, monastery, or church is utterly meaningless if it does not serve this end. If the abbey cannot be used to preach that “there is no power in us that is exempt from this reign” of Christ—that He must reign in the mind (accepting revealed truth), the will (obeying God’s laws), and the heart (loving God above all)—then its closure is a just chastisement.
The article’s entire framework is a symptom of the apostasy. It discusses buildings, numbers, and feelings while ignoring the ex cathedra definitions of the Faith, the sacrilegious destruction of the Mass, and the public worship of false gods in the “conciliar” temples. It quotes a “bishop” of the usurping “Pope” Leo XIV as an authority, thereby recognizing a manifest heretic (Bellarmine’s doctrine) as the Vicar of Christ. This is the spiritual bankruptcy made manifest: the blind leading the blind into the pit (Matt. 15:14).
The only hope for the restoration of such abbeys lies in the complete rejection of the conciliar sect and its modernist “clerics.” The faithful must cling to the immutable Faith handed down from the Apostles, as defined before the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958. They must await the provision of a true Pope, who will restore the rights of Christ the King over all nations and cleanse the sanctuary of the abomination of desolation (Dan. 9:27). The potential loss of La Trappe is not a tragedy to be managed by “dialogue” and “prayer” within the system; it is a prophetic sign of the judgment upon the “Church” that has abandoned its King. As Pius XI warned: “When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The abbey’s stones cry out this truth, while Barron and his like offer only the soothing, deadly balm of a naturalistic optimism that is the very essence of Modernism.
Source:
Trappists considering abandoning historic abbey after 900 years due to lack of vocations (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 11.03.2026