THE LURE OF SILENCE

Shannon News, 16 August 1929, Page 4

THE LURE OF SILENCE

MONKS WHO NEVER SPEAK. TAPS OX GROUND FOR WORDS.' Cowled men who never speak but use the primitive language of signs, who never see a woman, nor worry about civilisation, who work laboriously with their hands from 4 a.m. until their bedtime at 7 p.m.; such are the monks of Mount Melleray, the famous monastery in the Knockmoaldown mountains, County Waterford. Almost a hundred of them, priests and laymen, live in a tiny mediaeval world of their own, chiefly doing farm work and stock-rearing.

Many are the strange stories told of Mount" Melleray. A Dublin doctor who visited the.> monastery for a few days never came out again, but assumed the eowl and habit of the monks.

Stranger still—such is the silence, secrecy, and disinterestedness of the monks —an old priest on his death-bed sent for a confessor, and discovered that the priest who came was his bnv ther. They had lived together in the monastery 'for years without suspecting each other's identity.' When I visited the mon-astery, write? a correspondent of the Sunday Dispatch, I was received by-a small man ■in a brown habit and enormous shoes, and taken through a little green door in the wall. The small man was the guest brother and he introduced me to the guest master. These two alone, with the exception of the Abbot of Mount Melleray, are permitted to speak foi the purpose of welcoming visitors. The guest master arranged a room, heped I would stay a week, and said that tea —the last meal of the day—t would be at five o'clock.- Some of the monks seemed of great age but sturdy with the health of an out-of-doors life. Ai seven o'clock, in broad daylight, we were sent to bed.

A body of monks can peel potatoes or work in the garden; but when their task, is finished no one says, "Let's go." One man taps on the ground with his foot ad the others rise and follow him. Many of them have not been outside tthe walLs for 20 or 30 years and are ignorant of changes in dress, polities, and all the daily things that interest us.

A welcome is extended to visitors of every nationality or creed. They are received and entertained free for any period, though many visitors make offerings to the monastery before they leave its hospitable gates. One American who annually spent several weeks there without contributing a penny during his life, left a considerable fortune to the monastery at his death.