Manquehue and a Monastic Vocation

The Movimiento Apostolico Manquehue, or the Manquehue Apostolic Movement, first appeared on my radar in 2000 when I joined a weekly lectio divina group at the St. Louis Abbey, five years before I entered as a postulant. The group consisted of older Priory School alums, current dads, a Lutheran veterinarian and assorted other hangers-on like me. One of our spiritual leaders was Abbot Patrick Barry, superior of Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire, England, from 1984 to 1997. Abbot Patrick was in residence in St. Louis at the time and a great proponent and spiritual leader also of the lay Benedictine movement in Chile. Those in my group, too, were laymen at the time and quite happy and successful in our various spheres of commerce but eager to get closer to God.

In October 2001, a mere four weeks after the devastation of 9/11, two young men bravely flew from Santiago de Chile to St. Louis to explain to our group the method of lectio called “scrutinization” as practiced by MAM. Rafael and Pipo fanned embers into glowing coals within us, inviting any of us men who were able to journey to Chile for Semana Santa (Holy Week), the Holy Triduum and Eastertide 2002. Within weeks, not only Abbot Patrick, but St. Louis oblates Wayne and Michael and I booked airline tickets and accepted their welcoming call. For me, it was the most profound and deeply moving spiritual experience of my life to that point.

A Saint-Paul-falling-off-the-horse moment came over me on Easter Wednesday in the Octave, in a field at the MAM retreat compound in the southern Chilean Patagonia, where Abbot Patrick was celebrating an outdoor Mass. He had asked me to do the first reading (in English) which, for that day, is always Acts 3:1-10. The words leapt off the page at me as they never had in the past (clue: it’s about John and Peter, about silver and gold). Halfway through I had tears dripping off my face onto the lectionary. The Chilean schoolboys on that 2002 retreat with us must have thought I had altitude sickness. In a way I did. I was giddy about something higher indeed. Three years later I entered the abbey as a postulant, and I credit Abbot Patrick and Jose Manuel Eguiguren (and Rafael and Pipo) with encouraging and supporting my vocation.

I have told this story a hundred times, often in much greater detail, and I fall apart every time. My friend Fr. Benedict in St. Louis will attest to this. On our mission together to Chile in November 2019, we spoke to school groups, young alums, faculty, oblates, promesados. We spoke in classrooms, at lunches, at parties, at retreats. Some had heard the story before, including a few of the same schoolboys who were on that 2002 retreat and are now teachers and full-grown oblates in the MAM schools.

The full impact of the Manquehue involvement at Portsmouth Abbey School may not manifest itself for years to come, but it has already taken root. The connections exist and are strengthening. We Americans reached out to them when their country was in a threatening downward spiral in 2019 and more recently in 2020, they reciprocated with prayers and words of solace when our own cities throughout the U.S. were in flames.

Since that first life-changing journey to Chile in 2002, I have made three subsequent visits. In 2005, as Abbot Patrick’s health was faltering, I was assigned to be his Infirmarian in St. Louis while still a novice. Around that time, he wrote A Cloister in the World, the definitive history of the early years of MAM which I proofread for him and helped edit. The good abbot eventually felt the urge to return to his beloved Ampleforth. We remained close until his death at age 98 on February 21, 2016. “The Times of London” eulogized him as “the mentor of a radical educational experiment in Chile.” May he rest in peace.