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FIRST TRAPPIST MONASTERY IN TAIWAN IS CONSECRATED

Updated: February 22, 1994 05:00 PM GMT
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The Monastery of the Holy Mother of God, the first Trappist monastery in Taiwan, was consecrated Feb. 2 at Shuili, 150 kilometers southwest of Taipei.

According to Prior Dom Benedict Chao of the Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of Joy on Lantau Island in Hong Kong, the project is a joint venture between his monastery and the Abbey of New Clairvaux in California, the United States.

With the approval of retired Maryknoll Bishop William F. Kupfer of Taichung, Prior Chao and Abbot D. Thomas Davis of New Clairvaux respectively sent a priest and a brother to Taiwan to launch the project.

Construction of the hillside monastery was started in 1984 and completed in 1991 at a cost of several hundred thousand U.S. dollars, said Prior Chao, who initiated the project.

The new monastery was established to provide an easier way for Catholics in Taiwan to join the community, he told UCA News Feb. 16, and not in preparation for the removal of Our Lady of Joy from Lantau Island in Hong Kong.

Since plans for a new airport on Lantau were launched, there has been speculation that the Trappist community would move the monastery elsewhere to avoid the disturbance the construction and airport would create.

Monsignor Juliusz Janusz, charge d´affaires of the Taipei-based Apostolic Nunciature in China, Bishop Joseph Wang Yu-jung of Taichung, six bishops from other Taiwan dioceses and 80 priests participated in the Feb. 2 ceremony.

Among them were two Trappist abbots from Japan, Abbot Davis and Father Clement Kong, superior of the new monastery.

About 800 Catholics attended the ceremony on the feast of the Presentation of the Lord, which included the consecration of the monastery´s Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, designed by Father Nicolaus Kao of Our Lady of Joy.

The monastery in Taiwan currently has two priests and seven brothers.

The first Trappist monastery in Asia was built in northern China in 1883. The second was opened at Zhengding, also in northern China, in 1928.

There were about 50 Trappist brothers and priests in China when the communists took over the country in 1945. Subsequently, about a dozen of them moved to Hong Kong.

Brother Anastasius Li Wai-hung, a Hong Kong-born Chinese who joined the community in 1990, took his first vows at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in the United States in December 1993.

He became the first brother to take the vows in Chinese since the Cistercian order was founded in 1098 in France.

Trappists, the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, derive their name from the Cistercian monastery at La Trappe, France, which gained prominence during the major 17th-century reform within the order.

This reform eventually led, in the late 1800s, to a separation between the Trappists and the Sacred Order of Cistercians, or Common Observance.

There are seven Trappist convents with 258 nuns and 11 abbeys with 246 brothers and priests in the order´s Asia and the South Pacific Region, which includes Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines and, now, Taiwan.

END

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