A New French Abbey: Tradition’s Enduring Appeal
19th October 2025
The Europe that the monk Raoul Glaber saw with pride at the dawn of the year 1000, covered with “a white mantle of churches,” has entered a dark era of de-Christianisation. Church towers gave way to minarets, and city churches, gradually falling into disuse, were at best converted into trendy bars or contemporary art exhibition halls—when they were not destroyed once and for all. And what of the monasteries, those spacious buildings that once housed cohorts of monks whose prayers, recited from dawn to dusk, set the rhythm of the days and seasons in the countryside?
Today, many of them are real estate complexes that have become useless. The monks are ageing and are going to end their days in medical care facilities that have only a very distant relationship with stained glass windows and ribbed vaults.
And yet, there are still communities in France that continue to speak to young people and are capable not only of erecting walls and building new monasteries, but also of restoring ancient walls threatened with abandonment.