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REVIEWS
A TREE ROOTED IN FAITH: A HISTORY OF QUEEN OF ANGELS MONASTERY
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by Alberta Dieker
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| Wipf & Stock Publishers, Inc., Eugene, Oregon, 2007. Photographs, notes. 217 pages. $24.00 paper. |
| Sister Alberta Dieker, a longtime member and former prioress of the Queen of Angels Benedictine community at Mount Angel, is a trained historian and a good storyteller. In this book, written to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the monastery's founding, she recounts the vibrant and often difficult history of her community with respect, even reverence, without glossing over the struggles, conflicts, and disillusionments that inevitably arise in the life of any human community, religious or secular. She has given us an engaging story, although one with a somewhat narrow scope. |
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Dieker begins her tale with Sister Bernardine Wachter, the strong-willed German nun who helped carry the Benedictine rule of her Swiss mother-house to America. In 1876, Wachter immigrated and joined a group of Swiss monks and nuns who had settled in Missouri. In 1882, she was part of a group that came west to the German-speaking town of Gervais, Oregon. Two years later, both communities settled in the nearby town of Fillmore, which the fathers renamed Mount Angel, after Engelberg, their home monastery in Switzerland. |
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A Tree Rooted in Faith traces the sisters' struggles and successes as they built up their monastic community in Mount Angel, founded a boarding school and a college, educated Indian children, staffed parochial schools throughout the Willamette Valley and beyond, and opened their doors to Oregon girls desiring a religious life, all the while maintaining their strict Benedictine prayer life. Dieker documents big and small milestones: the blessing of the new convent in 18, the death of Mother Bernardine in 1901, the first movie the sisters ever saw in 1921 ("a series of biblical representations described as 'very devotional'"), the election of the first American-born prioress in 1931, and the liberalization of dress standards in the wake of Vatican II (p. 119). She details often-painful adjustments in prayer and community life as the sisters' ministry evolved to meet modern challenges. |
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Dieker does not shrink from telling hard truths about the sisters' lives, especially in the early days: the endless work, the constant money problems, the taken-for-granted sexism — the sisters were expected to serve as unpaid domestic help for the Mount Angel priests, in addition to maintaining their teaching careers and prayer lives. She writes of power struggles and disciplinary actions as candidly as the record allows; sometimes the "pious prose" of an early chronicler glosses over what actually happened, prompting Dieker to make educated guesses (p. 15). |
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In the end, the key topics in this book are of greater historical interest to religious than to lay people. The introduction, a fine essay on the historical context of monasticism in the nineteenth century, led me to expect a similar broad treatment in the rest of the book — an exploration of how a twentieth-century American religious community shaped and was shaped by its political and social environment. But the book's focus seems to narrow as the author moves closer to the present, and she tends to recount later events as a mere chronicle rather than using them as material for critical reflection. |
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It is not easy for a historian to balance an insider's point of view with that of an outsider. Dieker wrote this history as an insider, and it is clear that her primary audience is fellow members of the Queen of Angels community. The book is not an interpretive history of monasticism in the Pacific Northwest, but perhaps that was not the book Dieker set out to write. It is, nevertheless, an engaging, well-written story that will interest Catholics, members of other religious communities, and students of Willamette Valley history. |
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| Gail Wells
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| Corvallis, Oregon |
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