dolores 3

The roots of the Abbey of Regina Laudis... 

have their origin in the war-torn France of World War II. 

In 1936, a young American woman, Vera Duss, who had lived in France for much of her life, received her Doctor of Medicine degree [m.n. chirurg] from the Sorbonne. 

Less than a week later, she stunned her family and colleagues by entering the Benedictine Abbey of Notre Dame de Jouarre, near Paris, with the intention of becoming a nun. In time, she was clothed and given the name Soeur Benoit. 

A life of quiet obscurity might have followed but, instead, World War II broke out. The town of Jouarre was seized by the German army, and the Abbey itself was occupied by Nazi officers. 

As an American, Mother Benedict was by definition an enemy of the Germans, and was forced to live a life of hiding at Jouarre, in semi-seclusion, until the war was over. 

When even this became too dangerous, she fled to Paris and hid in a tiny apartment in the Place Von Furstenberg, where she narrowly escaped being captured by the Gestapo.

 

With the German army increasingly on the retreat...

Mother Benedict was able to return to the Abbey of Jouarre, though still in hiding. 

On August 27, 1944, word came that an army was entering the village. Mother Benedict was quite ill at the time, under the care of the infirmary. Nevertheless, on hearing this news, she ran to the top of the 11th-Century tower to see for herself. 

Leaning out of the tower window, she caught sight of the advancing army, a five-pointed white star emblazoned on the hood of each vehicle. Shortly afterward, she saw an American flag unfurl, and so was assured that it was the American army that was liberating Jouarre! (It would be twenty years before she was able to ascertain that the liberating army was General George S. Patton’s Third Army.) 

In response to this dramatic 'lifting of oppression' by the American soldiers, and their spirit of self-sacrifice, Mother Benedict felt the unequivocal need to respond in some commensurate [evenredige] way. Nurturing this revelation over subsequent weeks and months, she became convinced that she was called to return to America, to found a monastery. To 'plant monastic life in America'. 

Once this insight was clear to her, she was undaunted [niet af te schrikken] in taking the steps necessary to pursue this mission.

In 1947, she left France for America, accompanied by her loyal friend from Jouarre, Mother Mary Aline Trilles de Warren, O.S.B., whose heroic courage had kept Mother Benedict from falling into the hands of the Gestapo.

Duss and Mother Mary Aline Trilles de Warren moved to the United States in 1946, and founded the Regina Laudis monastic community in 1947, near the farm of artists Lauren Ford and Frances W. Delehanty in Bethlehem, Connecticut. The community's founding inspired the movie Come to the Stable (1949), starring Loretta Young and Celeste Holm. 

Mother Benedict became an abbess in 1975... 

when the community became an abbey. 

[bron]