DOM MARK SCOTT
Our last conference on Anselm Le Bail introduced us to Dom Norbert Sauvage. He was abbot of Scourmont, Belgium, in the early twentieth century, 1902 to 1913. After his retirement as abbot, Dom Norbert served the Order as procurator General until he died in 1923. During those ten years, he lived in Rome, Italy.
When I was a student in Rome in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I would frequently take a bus or a train to Grottaferrata or to Frascati, two lovely small cities in the Alban hills east of Rome. If I went to Grotta, then it was an easy and pleasant walk to Frascati, and if I went to Frascati first, it was an easy and pleasant walk to Grottaferrata. There is an ancient Basilian monastery at Grottaferrata, Saint Nilus, where I used to spend some time in prayer. And, of course, Grottaferrata is the original home of your own motherhouse, Vitorchiano. I am sure you know the story very well.
I imagine that Dom Norbert Sauvage did the same thing that I did. He would take a day or two to get out of Rome, and what better place to go than to Grottaferrata? In his time, though, the Trappistines were still there, very much a spiritual presence in that part of Italy. One historian says that “from the beginning of his stay in Rome, Dom Norbert took charge of the spiritual formation of the community of Grottaferrata” and was their confessor for many years. We can imagine that he brought the same vision to Grotta that he had brought to Scourmont, though he probably did not bring any cigars for the sisters. “He wanted the nuns to be formed in a solid spirituality, … in the Scriptures and” in the Cistercian fathers.
Once, Dom Norbert told the sisters, “To study [the heart of Jesus] we have to study and meditate on the whole Gospel to discover all the love he shows us..we must study him in the Eucharist.” At another time, he said, “to take the pure water of a stream… one must go back to the source. So to find the true spirit of the Order, we must return to the founders, study their writings, their spirit, and especially their example.”
In 1916, Dom Norbert gave a retreat at Grotta to a 24-year-old woman, Elena Gullini. Gullini was born in Bologna, but had moved to Rome. She is described as “a beauty of extraordinary elegance,” “refined, cultured, and intelligent, with a golden voice, a smile, and a charm which she always preserved.” In Rome, Elena Gullini studied languages, painting, and music, and was very much part of high society.
But the glamor of her life in Rome did not capture her heart. She made her retreat with Dom Norbert at Grotta as part of her discernment about entering religious life. “My way is love,” she said, sounding like the Little Flower. A year later, Elena in fact became a Trappistine at Laval in France, where she was given the name Pia after Pope, later Saint, Pius X, from whom she had received her First Communion. Even though she arrived at the monastery in the luxurious sleeping car of the train she had taken from Rome, she adapted immediately to the very rough and humble ways of the French Trappist sisters at Laval. She wrote, “I did not come here because I was attracted by the spirit of penance or the work; no! I came in order to love the Lord better.” You can hear Dom Norbert Sauvage in that remark.
Even after Elena Gullini entered Laval, Dom Norbert Sauvage continued as her director, through letters and even through personal visits to Laval. In 1921, Dom Norbert conducted the community retreat at Laval. Among the topics of that retreat were, of course, the need to study Christ and to live in intimacy with him; the divine motherhood; Jesus, the divine spouse; Mary’s motherhood; and the five dispositions that the knowledge of God will produce in us: admiration, adoration, respect, surrender, and confidence. Mother Pia remarked that after this retreat of Dom Norbert the community of Laval “began to study the gospel with commentaries and synopses. …. It was,” she said about the retreat, “a real breath of supernatural life, the life of love lived by the ancient Cistercians, who so deeply loved the spiritual books and whose spirituality is so simple: Jesus and nothing else besides him. But in such a relationship of intimacy, trust, and abandonment.”
Soon, Pia became the novice director of lay sisters at Laval. There were about forty novices. She warned the sisters against spending too much time at work: “Imagine a bride who takes good care of her husband, preparing his meals, well and even his clothing, but never has time to be with him, to talk to him, and live in intimacy with him. Do you think he’d be happy? No, he needs affection and intimacy with her.” Her point was that Jesus needed affection and intimacy from them.
But then, in 1926, Pia was sent to Grottaferrata. It seemed that some in the Order were manipulating things so that Pia would end up as superior there.
I imagine that Dom Norbert had something to do with Pia’s unusual transfer from one monastery and country to another monastery and country. For her, the transfer was, she said, “a sacrifice.” And, in fact, in 1931, five years later, Mother Pia was the abbess of Grottaferrata, a fervent community, but poor materially and intellectually.
Mother Pia was into her fourth year as abbess when a young woman from Sardinia showed up to enter Grottaferrata. That young woman was, of course, Maria Sagheddu, whom we know as Blessed Maria Gabriella of Unity.
You know the story better than I do, so I will not repeat it. My point is simply to show the marvelous and providential, and you might say improbable intersection of lives, in this case, Norbert Sauvage of Belgium, Elena Gullini of Rome, and Maria Sagheddu of Dorgali, an intersection that shaped the monastic conscience of each and even shaped their particular form of Cistercian holiness.
Madre Pia was introduced in the mid-30’s to the hopes and challenges of ecumenism by a French laywoman she had befriended while still at Laval. By 1936, she was in regular contact with Abbe Paul Couturier, the great promoter of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Madre Pia would thrust her unsuspecting community of Grottaferrata into an apostolate practically unheard of for Italian women religious of the time, let alone Trappistines of any nationality: the newly opened “ecumenical movement.” She was in contact with Brother Roger of Taizé and became a close friend of Brother Roger’smother.
In their news bulletin for 1950, the nuns of Grotta announced to the Cistercian Order, “Visitors to Grotta have been almost continuous during this Holy Year, coming from the many parts of Italy as well as from outside. Among our pilgrim friends are a good number of separated brethren. In September, an important international meeting of specialists in the area of Christian Unity was held at the Greek Catholic Abbey of Saint Nilus. In 1948, Madre Pia wrote a letter to a woman doing research for a new biography of Maria Gabriella. “Years of experience with this question of ‘Reunion’… have led me to understand that the success of your book will rest on the fact that there is nothing whatsoever about her life that anyone could use as a fulcrum for controversy… Those who are ignorant of the problem will come to understand it from the example of Sister Maria Gabriella. Those who are experts will find in her a repose they had never known before, a pacifying light, a new horizon disposing them to love rather than debate.”
In his homily on the occasion of the beatification of Maria Gabriella, January 25, 1983, Pope John Paul II observed that she had the capacity to receive and put into practice with ‘the intelligence of love’ Saint Benedict’s ‘school of the Lord’s service’… “It was precisely in her fidelity to listening that the young Maria Sagheddu succeeded in realizing that ‘conversion of heart’ that St Benedict asks of his children; conversion of heart that is the true and primary source of unity.”
- Some months before her death, Maria Gabriella confessed, “I have abandoned myself totally into the hands of the Lord…I feel I love my Spouse with all my heart, but I want to love him even more. I want to love him for those who do not love him, for those who despise him, for those who offend him: in short, my desire is nothing but to love.” You can, can’t you, hear Dom Norbert in that prayer, and through Dom Norbert Madre Pia, and behind Dom Norbert Dom Anselm Le Bail.
“Blessed Maria Gabriella Sagheddu,” said John Paul II, “became a sign of the times and a model of that ‘Spiritual Ecumenism’ of which the Second Vatican Council reminded us. She encourages us to look with optimism — over and above the inevitable difficulties that are ours as human beings — to the marvelous prospects of ecclesial unity, whose progressive verification is linked with the ever deeper desire to be converted to Christ, in order to make active and effective his yearning: Ut omnes unum sint!” ◼