‘Maybe we can be an antidote to depression’
Anna Arco meets one of Austria's chart-topping Cistercian monks
6 June 2008

Fr Karl Wallner, one of the monks at a Cistercian abbey in Austria

For the monks at Stift Heiligenkreuz, Europe's oldest continuous Cistercian abbey just outside Vienna, the internet has been a handy tool. Their website has existed in various incarnations since the early days of the internet and has served to attract some of the newer brothers, including the monastery's music director. But although they are media savvy, they did not imagine that an off-the-cuff email sent as an afterthought early this year would draw the world's eye to their secluded cloisters and catapult them to the top of the music charts.

Being the centre of attention, however, is nothing new here. Benedict XVI's visit to the abbey in 2007 was a televised affair and Florian von Henkel-Donnersmark, the writer and director of the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others, wrote most of the script there. The monks even held a party for the Oscars.

But if Dr Pater Karl Wallner, an energetic monk who deals with the monastery's publicity on top of a million other things, is not being disingenuous, they actually believed that Universal Studios was a Welsh recording company.

It has been quite a year for religious music - with Universal and Sony vying for a market share of a renewed demand, prompted by its presence in video games. Universal advertised in the English-speaking press for religious who focused on Gregorian chant and it was a chance email from a friend which prompted Pater Karl to send Universal's talent scouts a link to the monks' website in January.

If they won the contract, he thought, they could save €10,000 on a CD that the Cistercians were planning to record this year. When the talent scouts emailed back asking for a demo tape, Pater Karl sent them a link to a YouTube video that one of the "techie, computer freak younger brothers" had made. The rest is history.

They signed the contract, did the recordings and have weathered the media storm, although Abbot Gregor von Henkel-Donnersmark and some of the other monks were all for calling off the project when the phone didn't stop ringing and camera crews and journalists invaded the monastery while Pater Karl was on holiday in Egypt. Now, Pater Karl says, it is hard to curb the monks' enthusiasm.

On the feast of Corpus Christi, Pater Karl is in London giving interviews. The record has just been released and is rapidly making headway in the charts. What the people sitting at the tables around him in the hotel restaurant must think about the tall 45-year-old in the distinctive black and white habit and trendy facial hair one can only imagine, but what Pater Karl thinks of London becomes abundantly clear.

"It's been really nice to be here and it's nice to get a chance to taste luxury, but I can't wait to get back home. I'm so sad to be missing this," he says in his calm, nasal Austrian drawl as he shows me photographs of the Cistercians' massive Corpus Christi procession from last year.

This morning he has had a lie-in, waking up at 7am instead of the usual 4am. But he's already been in search of a Corpus Christi Mass in vain since the feast has been transferred to the Sunday.

"England is really a very secular country - the only religious figure anyone is interested in is the Dalai Lama. But maybe our CD will speak to people."

He is keen to stress that the project is not just the product of a bunch of attention-seeking monks, but that this is their sacred music, their form of prayer, and that the whole thing happened in a haphazard sort of way.

Stift Heiligenkreuz is one of Europe's religious success stories and not just because of the new Gregorian CD. With 70 monks its membership is at a 200-year high and the average age is 46. This year they have six novices and five candidates. Pater Karl says that, at 45, he belongs to the older third of the monastery's members.

"We are very blessed. I sometimes think that maybe God is using us, especially with this, as an anti-depressant for the general frustration that many people feel with the Church," he says.

Mentioning a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria with a similarly rigorous life and an enthusiastic young abbot, but which has had no new vocations in the last few years, he says that it is impossible to know what it is ultimately that brings them to Heiligenkreuz.

Described as "reform of the reform", the monastery combines tradition with modern life. Singing the Divine Office in public is taken seriously with Vigil at 5.15am followed by Lauds at 6am.

"We reformed the liturgy according to the rite of the Second Vatican Council, but we said, 'please, we are monks' - so we developed our own Latin breviary in the 1970s with our own choral settings. We have Mass in Latin five days a week and in German twice a week.

"It's funny. For years we got walloped by the Left for not entering into the 'spirit of Vatican II' and since the publication of the Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificum, we have been criticised by some conservatives for not using the extraordinary form. But we have our beautiful liturgy which is based on our traditions."

Pater Karl reckons that the Pope came to Heiligenkreuz in 2007 to show his support for their particular approach to the Novus Ordo: "I think that the Holy Father really loves this expression of the liturgy which has taken everything right and good from the Second Vatican Council but avoided the mad excesses committed in its name."

It is this expression of the liturgy, this way of bringing the heart closer to God, that makes Heiligenkreuz so attractive for young and old, looking for a faith that is not radicalised or marginalised, says Pater Karl. But he isn't exactly sure what it is that brings them so many young men who want to join their number.

Paraphrasing the 20th century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, he suggests: "If you're being walloped by the Left and you're being walloped by the Right, then you know you're in the middle."

www.stift-heiligenkreuz.org