This past Wednesday the Humanities class journeyed to St. Meinrad, Indiana to visit the St. Meinrad’s Monastery. Hidden in the hills of Indiana, this beautiful archabbey, one of only eleven in the world, is home to over 90 monks. This monastery is of the Roman Catholic Benedictine order, an order that stresses hospitality as one of their main tenets. The abbey and the city in which it resides are both named after Saint Meinrad, a Benedictine monk who was murdered by two men he had offered his hospitality to.
In the company of Father Stephen, the class explored the monastery, the building where the monks live and take their meals, and the archabbey, the actual church, and its grounds. Students got a brief look at the Catholic faith as we participated in noon prayers, a short service that is one of the five times that the resident monks pray throughout the day. After noon prayers, we ate lunch at the Monte Cassino shrine, an extension of St. Meinrad’s that sits atop a hill less than a mile away from the archabbey proper. The Monte Cassino shrine is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and is said to be a place of rest and healing.
Lydia Powell, who is in her first year at VAMPY, said, “It was definitely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.”