Crunchy Con brings to us a piece written by Russell Hittinger on Clear Creek Monastery (from Crisis magazine, 1999).

But more than 150 years ago, Benedictine monasticism was revived at Solesmes under conditions that would have seemed even more unusual. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, from Lisbon to Vienna, European civil authorities declared war on monasticism. As Rousseau said, "Wherever the Clergy constitutes a body it is the master and lawgiver in its realm." Religious orders constituted such a "body" par excellence. Deriving their authority from Rome, they enjoyed independence from the local church and from civil powers. Such imperium in imperio was unacceptable to the new European regimes. Monastic institutions were an affront not only to the state but also to the new civic culture of republicanism. Garat l'Aine declared in the Assemblée Nationale in 1790 that the religious vow "is a civil suicide." Monks, he alleged, detach their affections from things of the world without giving anything back to society in the form of schools, hospitals, or orphanages. In a word, he said, monks are "useless."

The new constitutional democracies in Europe used every means at their disposal to eliminate monasticism. Within one generation, only 30 of 1,500 Benedictine abbeys survived in Europe. Cluny, the capital of medieval monasticism in the West, was closed and auctioned off to the highest bidder. Citeaux and Clairvaux likewise were confiscated and turned into state prisons. At La Trappe, the Trappists were rounded up for chain gangs, and some of the monks were sent to the penal colony of Conenama in French Guiana. By 1803, every one of the 68 Carthusian houses in France and the 18 in Germany had vanished under the legal and extralegal policies of the new regimes. Augustinian Hermits disappeared forever from Portugal, where they once had 50 monasteries. At the end of the 19th century, 500 Dominican houses had dwindled to 80, and the total number of friars plummeted from 25,000 to about 3,000. The consecrated life of religious was over, or so it seemed.

How easy it is for us to forget the war that was waged against the Church in the 18th and 19th centuries by the secular governments.