Cistercian Order

Cistercian Order. The Order was founded at Citeaux in 1098 by St Robert of Molesme and others who wanted a form of Benedictinism stricter and more primitive than any then existing. After some precarious years St Bernard arrived as a novice in 1112, and the Order spread rapidly.

The Cisterican life was one of secluded communal intercession and adoration. Houses were erected only in remote situations; churches were plain, and manual work given its primitive prominence. The constitution developed in the 12th cent., and its basic documents (including the Carta Caritatis) took shape gradually in the process. A founding abbey had permanent oversight over abbeys which it founded; this was achieved through visitation by the abbot to ensure observance and discipline. Daughter-abbeys could make foundations of their own; thus lines of filiation developed. Cîteaux itself was visited by the abbots of its eldest daughters (the ‘protoabbots’). All Cistercian abbots were obliged to attend an annual General Chapter; in this was vested legislative, executive and judicial authority over the whole Order.

Starting with Castile in the 15th cent., foreign houses formed national congregations outside the control of Cîteaux. In the 17th cent. Cistercians, like other orders, were divided between reformers (the Strict Observance), who rejected all mitigations of the Rule, and those, led by Cîteaux, who wanted a minimum of change (the Common Observance).

In the 18th cent. Cistercians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire survived the Josephine edicts only by undertaking educational and parochial responsibilities. Soon afterwards the French Revolution destroyed not only all houses in France and the neighbouring lands, but also the structure of central authority. Government hostility to monastic life in the 19th cent. and wars and other crises in the 20th, led to massive closures and expulsions. The Abbot General of the Common Observance now presides over a union of about a dozen congregations of differing patterns of life.

The extinction of Cîteaux and the protoabbeys in 1790/91 left la Trappe as the only French male community of any order to survive. Twenty-four monks fled to Switzerland; they soon attracted recruits and founded communities in various countries. Some of these followed A.-J. le B. de Rancé's original reform, others the even more rigorous regime adopted by the Trappists in Switzerland, only partly relaxed when they returned to France. In 1892 the three Trappist congregations were united and in 1893 recognized as a new independent order; in 1902, after Cîteaux became their mother house, they were designated the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance or Reformed Cistercians. This Order is not the continuation of the Strict Observance destroyed in 1791, but the lineal descendant of de Rancé's reform of 1664 at la Trappe. Worldwide expansion strained the practice of uniformity, and under the new constitutions approved in 1990, cultural differences are recognized, but the regime of the Trappists remains austere. The two separate Cistercian Orders co-operate.