THE ABBEY ON HIGHWAY 114

A MONASTERY seems like part of another world -a slower, pre-nuclear, pre-electric time when, for better and worse, all truth was thought to be vested in the one true Church of Rome.

So it seems strange to turn off busy Highway 114 in Irving -at a point almost equidistant from the gleaming towers of Mammon in Las Colinas and the holy shrine of Texas Stadium -and drive up a gently sloping hill into the parking lot of a monastery.

Strange, but there it is: Our Lady of Dallas – one of four Cistercian monasteries in the United States and home to 27 Cistercian monks. But, in many ways, the monastic life there does not fit the popular stereotype. No cowled figures drift ghostlike through windowless halls; the building-a long, open rectangle – looks like many schools and churches built during the early Sixties. The halls are quiet but flooded with light and adorned with artwork. These Cistercians do not abhor pleasure or seek that mortification of the flesh that was the summum bonum of medieval monks. TVs, radios and stereos are permitted, and at mealtime, the aroma of well-prepared food is everywhere. Moderation, not abstinence, is the watchword; a bottle of wine often graces the dinner table. After all, for centuries the Cistercians were known for their excellent European vineyards.

These monks are “modern” in another way: They are not strictly cloistered -confined to their abbey for life. Most of the fathers leave the monastery each day to teach at the University of Dallas or at Cistercian Preparatory School, founded by the order in 1962. The Cistercians have been involved in secondary education in Europe since the 18th century -“a long time for you, not so long for them,” says Cistercian headmaster Father Bernard Marton (the Cistercian order was founded during the 12th century).

The monks who founded Cistercian Preparatory School came from Hungary after World War II, when Hungarian monastic orders faced increasing pressure from the Soviet-backed regime. In 1948, the Cistercian schools were closed; in 1950, the monasteries were confiscated and the order was officially suppressed. “Not all of the orders were outlawed – only the most vigorous,” says Abbot Anselm Nagy, the superior of Our Lady of Dallas. “They let a few remain open as tokens so they could say they had freedom of religion.”

Father Nagy, now 68, became a novice in a Cistercian monastery at the age of 19. After five years’ study in Rome, he returned to Hungary during World War II. After the war, when the Communists seized power in Hungary, Nagy was asked by his superiors to go to America to prepare a place for the Cistercians in case they were forced to flee their country. Cistercians take a vow of stability that ensures them a place in their monastery until death, so Nagy was not bound to obey his abbot’s request. But he chose to do so and came to America in 1946 at the age of 31. He spoke no English.

Nagy settled in a Cistercian monastery near Milwaukee. The abbey was too far from the nearest town to attract students, so he and his fellow monks began looking for a place to establish a new monastery and school. They visited 18 dioceses around the country, concentrating on the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest, and they eventually decided on two locations. But the bishops in both areas requested that the monks bring $100,000 with them to assure their foundation. Nagy’s group didn’t have that much money at its disposal, so plans for a new monastery were temporarily shelved.

In 1955, Nagy (by then the superior of the Hungarian fathers) received a phone call from the sisters of St. Mary School in Fort Worth, who asked if his group would be interested in helping found a university in Dallas. The monks came to Dallas that year, and when the sisters were forced to withdraw from the project, they decided to go it alone. The University of Dallas opened in 1956.

In 1957, the Cistercians built the first wing of their monastery, and 14 fathers (most of them faculty members at the University of Dallas) made it their home. Soon, UD students with young children were asking Nagy to start a boys’ prep school (modeled after the European “gymnasium”) like those the Cistercians had operated in Hungary. Nagy was glad to oblige, on the condition that the parents raise $250,000 within five years. They did, and in 1962, Cistercian Preparatory School opened its doors with 50 boys in grades four and five. Adding a form (grade level) each year, Cistercian graduated its first senior class in 1970. Today, the school has some 240 students in grades five through 12.

Cistercian’s headmaster, Father Mar-ton, is the third headmaster in the school’s 20-year history. Marton, 42, is the only Hungarian member of the abbey to join the order after coming to America. “I had no idea I’d become a Cistercian or a monk when I left Hungary,” he says, “but I knew I wanted to be a teacher.”

Marton’s full-time faculty consists of nine Cistercian fathers and 11 lay teachers. The lay teachers’ salaries are on a par with any in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, while the Cistercian fathers receive only minimal salaries, which they turn over to the monastery. As a result, Cistercian’s tuition is kept surprisingly low for a prep school: a maximum of $2,750 per year. By comparison, St. Mark’s and Hockaday both charge more than $5,000 per year.

Almost 90 percent of Cistercian’s teachers have advanced degrees, and six hold doctorates. And there is no class system here, with the M.A.s and Ph.D.s hogging the upper-level courses. The head of Cistercian’s English department, a Ph.D., teaches fifth-grade English and Latin.

Cistercian faculty members work on one-year contracts with no guarantee of tenure, but turnover is very low; on the average, Cistercian teachers have been there at least 10 years. Faculty members need not be Cistercian or even Catholic, although Abbot Nagy admits a preference for both. Teachers are in the classroom about 20 hours per week, and the entire class period is used for instruction -not for catching up on grading while students thumb through magazines. Homework – and there is plenty of it – is graded outside of class.

Cistercian is a small school, and Father Marton is candid about the advantages and disadvantages of small classes. Students do get a great deal of individual attention from their instructors, and it seems to pay off: It’s not unusual for half the student body to make one of the school’s three honor rolls, for which at least a B average is required. The 1983 senior class had a total mean score of 1224 on the SAT tests, almost 300 points above quality public high schools such as Highland Park and Piano. The majority of Cistercian students go on to college in Texas, but a good number have been accepted to Ivy League schools.

With its small classes, Cistercian can risk some innovative measures not feasible in larger schools. For example, the class schedule is rotated each week so that students do not attend the same class at the same time every day. As public school teachers will attest, some classes are never very good simply because they come at the wrong times-just before lunch, for instance, or at the end of the day. At Cistercian, a student who suffers midafternoon droop will not find his blood sugar plunging during the same class all year long. Likewise, the teacher who starts slow but picks up after lunch will divide his energies equally among his students.

But small is not always beautiful, Mar-ton says. The Cistercian education is intensely cumulative, so students who drop out after the ninth grade are seldom replaced. “By the time they’re in the ninth grade,” Marton says, “they’re one full year ahead of their peers in public schools.” The result is very small graduating classes. The class of ’78 – the largest in the school’s history -produced 24 graduates; only 16 will cross the stage this year.

In addition, small classes make it tough for the school to sponsor extracurricular activities requiring much boypower. But there is a school newspaper and a yearbook, and, surprisingly, Cistercian fields teams in football, basketball, soccer, track and tennis, with more than 75 percent of the students belonging to some organized team. True, Bear Bryant was never seen snooping around campus; Marton admits that there are no dreams of an athletic dynasty at Cistercian. “Opposing coaches very much love to schedule us,” he says with a smile, “but we dp all right. We have winning seasons and losing seasons. Several parents would like us to be more concerned with sports, but I resist that. Priorities are priorities, and our athletic department is fully aware of that.”

Cistercian Preparatory School is not for everyone, Marton says. Due to poor work habits and latent perfectionism, some boys who are otherwise qualified would have to work far too hard at Cistercian. Middle-school students (grades five through eight) can expect one to two hours of homework each night, while upper-school boys (grades nine through 12) will hit the books for as many as three hours a night. Marton has heard horror stories about one student studying seven hours a night, but says he “strongly disapproves” of such extreme dedication.

“A kid who was number one in his other school and cherishes that position might also have problems at Cistercian,” Marton says. “Here, he will have competition. There might be six or eight kids as good as he, and he might not come out on top.” Marton recalls one boy who grew despondent when his name was not at the top of his class. He asked to be withdrawn from the school, and much to Marton’s displeasure, the parents obliged. “In this world, we cannot always be the absolute number one in everything,” he says. “Children need to learn that.”

Cistercian sorely needs to expand its facilities, Marton says. Currently, the school has only two science labs, one of which doubles for chemistry and biology; the other is used for physics, audio-visual presentations and music. Since Cistercian’s first graduates are just now entering their peak earning years, the school has no backlog of well-heeled alumni. Unless money for expansion is found, Marton says, the school will have to radically revise its structure, possibly by dropping one or two of the lower grades.

“I am very much opposed to that,” Mar-ton says. “We would lose about a year at the top level, since we could not require everybody to take calculus and be ready for college English. We’d have to reconcile ourselves to being just another good high school. It would be a discounted education.”

The cuts would also force Cistercian to reject more applicants, a task Marton describes as very difficult already. Cistercian now tests about two students for each opening; of the students tested, about two out of three are eventually admitted, sometimes after a lengthy period on a waiting list.

“We try to get the ones that are better qualified,” Marton says, “but the best choice may not always be the one that scored the highest.” When choosing its students, Cistercian takes into account previous grades, recommendations from former teachers and counselors and entrance exams. “Recommendations count quite heavily, and so does the cooperation we get from the parents and from the child himself,” says Marton. “I try to test at least one of the sections myself. I make note of what the boys look like, how they behave and how they strike me.”

At many prep schools, the student roster reads like a Who’s Who of junior millionaires; not so at Cistercian. The average student is from a middle-income family, with 20 percent requiring some form of financial aid from the school. Minorities (mostly Mexican-American) make up 12 percent of the total enrollment.

“We bend over backwards to get a wide spectrum of students,” Marton says. “We don’t want them thinking they’re isolated or off on an island somewhere. They know there are kids who are not as well-off as they are.”

Cistercian administrators have good reason to believe that alumni will remember the school both in their hearts and their checkbooks -many return to the school every year for visits and reunions. Some of that loyalty may be due to Cistercian’s form master system, in which one faculty member is assigned to each entering class. The form master is that form’s counselor, disciplinarian and confidant throughout their years at Cistercian. Mar-ton’s first group graduated in 1977; he was then “recycled” to another group that is now nearing graduation.

“The form master will know those boys better than some of their parents do,” Marton says. In weekly form master’s meetings, the boys air their gripes with each other, their teachers and the form master himself. The form master’s free periods are scheduled to coincide with his form’s study hall, thus encouraging boys to seek him out with problems too delicate for group discussion. If a student seems to have a legitimate grievance, the form master becomes his advocate, tracking the problem to its source and, if necessary, intervening for the boy before other faculty or administrators. At least twice a year, the form master meets with the parents of students in his form. According to Mar-ton, the form master is able to give very specific directions to parents, “unlike the PTA meetings where nobody knows anybody and nobody cares.”

“There’s none of this ’Why wasn’t I informed?’ here,” Marton says. “If parents have been too lenient about letting a ’sick’ child stay home, the form master will probably say something about it. He may even invite some flak.”



FIVE HUNDRED years ago, Cistercian monasteries were essentially farming communities, ministering to simple farming people who came to the abbey for church services and to learn horticulture, wine-making and animal husbandry from the Cistercians, who were already famous for their advances in those areas.

Today, much has changed, according to Father Nagy. “We influence people now through different means,” he says. “Five hundred years ago, we influenced the farmers, and through them their families. Now we influence the children -and through them, their parents -to become better Christians.

“Externally,” Nagy says, “there is not much difference between our school and a good secular preparatory school. Their curriculum will be practically the same as ours, with one exception: We give religious teaching to everyone who comes to our school.”

That teaching begins in the fifth grade at Cistercian with a course described in the school catalog as giving “a solid catechetical foundation” to students. The central theme of the course is “redemption through Jesus Christ.” The religion courses become theology courses in ninth grade, when a course in “the fundamental articles of Catholic faith” is required. In their junior and senior years, Cistercian students can sign up for selected topics, courses dealing with existentialism, phenomenology and Marxism. The classes are designed to help the boys “confront” these philosophies “from the viewpoint of a mature Christian faith.”

Non-Catholics make up about one-third of Cistercian’s student body, and according to school rules, such students may, with their parents’ permission, be excused from taking theology courses and allowed to substitute an additional elective course each semester. “They can’t just go off to the library during that class and say, ’Glad I’m not a Catholic,’ ” Marton says.



IN MANY WAYS, the Cistercians of Our Lady of Dallas lead a far less restricted life than their brother monks, the Trap-pists. The Trappists are also Cistercians, but they follow what is called the Strict Observance. Trappists closely regulate their diets, often banning meat, fish and other animal products despite a regimen of demanding physical labor. They rise in the middle of the night to pray and may follow a rule of silence except in emergencies. A strictly cloistered Trappist is unable to leave the monastery for any reason other than extreme illness.

The Cistercians follow the Common Observance, with much less emphasis on regulating every aspect of life. Still, though their days are necessarily less uniform due to their teaching schedules, the monks do share a common framework of activities. They rise at 5:45 each day for morning prayer and mass. After breakfast, most teach throughout the morning. A small group meets for noon prayer in the chapel before lunch, but many of the monks have responsibilities with students during that time. When the day’s classes are over, the whole community gathers at 5 p.m. for a half hour of prayer. Then comes dinner, followed by evening prayer and free time. From 9 until 10 p.m., the monks work in their cells, preparing the next day’s lessons or grading papers. Quiet is encouraged during this time. By 10:30, all lights are out.

“It’s not an austere life, like a military school in which you are always in drill,” says Father Denis Farkasfalvy, Cistercian’s headmaster from 1969 to 1981. “But living in a community means accepting everyone’s burden. And there’s the solitude that results from the fact that you are not married.”

Amid much liberalization -some would say compromise -in the Catholic church during the past two decades, the monk’s ancient vows remain. Poverty. Chastity. Obedience. In an affluent, hedonistic society, these oaths are a blunt reminder that on some things, Mother Church refuses to budge.

Marton describes the poverty imposed on Cistercians as “a relative poverty,” but it seems real enough to the average consumer. The community provides the monk’s food, clothing and shelter; he literally owns nothing himself. The shoes he wears, the books he reads, the pen he writes with are all communal property. If he needs to make a purchase in the outside world, he goes to the abbot and requests money. Working monks donate their salaries to the abbey. For monks who must leave to do business outside, the monastery owns several cars that may be reserved a day in advance.

Abbot Nagy is a frail, soft-spoken man, but he gestures emphatically when discussing the vow of poverty. “It says that you will work for the community. You will not become attracted to worldly goods. You will never become a rich man.”

“You have to look not at what these vows tie you to, but what they free you from,” Marton says. Free from worries about medical bills, life insurance and balancing his checkbook, the monk is able to concentrate all his energy into his vocation.

“You can’t just look at these vows on a utilitarian level, asking what is the use of any of them,” Marton says. “The vows have a greater value. They are very much symbolic for the lay people; that is, it is possible to live a truly communistic life. After all, we are sharing all of our income. I think we are living the original command of the New Testament and the Gospels. They shared everything in common.”

As for the vow of chastity, critics since Voltaire have argued that by abstaining from sex and marriage, monks and nuns remove themselves from a vital human experience. Marton has heard this before. “Again,” he says patiently, “the vow helps us to live a more ideal Christian commitment. It’s a life of sacrifice, which I believe all Christians are called to. Yes, chastity removes you from one aspect of human experience, but it makes you available to everybody. You’re not tied down. Nobody has any second thoughts about why I’m nice to them. I can be more self-giving to people and not reserve any one particular person to myself.”

Father Denis, who left Hungary after the failure of the 1956 revolution, holds a doctorate in theology. He teaches math at Cistercian and theology part time at the University of Dallas. He, like all the monks at Our Lady of Dallas, sees the vow of obedience not as a doctrinal abstraction, but as a concrete reality in his life.

“I was not terribly interested in coming to Texas to begin with,” he says. Like many of the Cistercian fathers, he seems always ready to laugh or smile, even when recalling unpleasant details. “The decision was made by my superiors.” During the early Sixties, Denis thought he could serve his order best by staying in Europe, perhaps working with Hungarian refugees. “But from my superior’s standpoint, he thought this place needed young people if it was to survive.”

And Denis’ obedience did not stop there. With a doctorate in theology, he was sure that he would begin teaching theology full time at the University of Dallas. The abbot disagreed. The Cistercians were considering a school of their own, and Nagy needed a math teacher. “Of course, I did have some facility with mathematics to begin with, but it was not my heart’s desire,” Denis says. “Still, the common good and common goals have to outweigh the preference of the individual.” So, Denis began teaching math to middle- and upper-school students. “In retrospect, I’m glad I went through with it,” he says. “I’ve been reasonably successful in teaching math, and I’ll never be out of a job as long as I can speak.”

In a democratic society in which each person is urged to seek “self-realization,” the Cistercian’s vow of obedience may seem hard to understand. But Denis suggests that we consider the alternative, which he calls “rampant individualism.”

“This is why families are breaking down,” he says. “You cannot be your own boss and have another boss in the family, with each of the children bosses for themselves. No community can function unless people renounce their own say-so time and again. But we teach our children that as long as they are happy, we have no other concern.”

Drawing on his own experience, Denis decries the popular notion that for each individual there is one and only one perfect job that will lead him to fulfillment. “Really, there are hundreds of things which most people are capable of doing. Compromise is part of any human life, and so should it be in a monastery. That’s the way any human society works.”

Denis and the other monks feel that society often misunderstands something basic to the monastic life: People are in the monastery because they choose to be there. “What you are always meeting in those restrictions is your own choice, not somebody’s will being forced on you,” he says. “You must be consistent with your own commitments. The whole monastic life works on the basis of a commitment already made.”

Another popular misconception, some fathers say, has to do with the relationships between the monks in a monastery. All is not always bliss. A common faith does not dissolve all differences and turn bores into witty conversationalists. Where one or more are gathered together, it seems, someone will grate on the nerves.

“Of course, there are people here who are difficult to get along with,” Denis says. “On the level of instinctive reaction, you don’t like the way someone talks or behaves. But, of course, you don’t like your own mother or father or brother all the time, even with a blood tie and a common background.”

Abbot Nagy, as the monks’ superior, is responsible for settling any problems that the fathers cannot solve themselves. But Nagy neither expects nor wants an abbey in a state of catatonic bliss. “The great advantage to community life,” he says, “is that you do have problems. You are irritated. You have to make decisions and judgments, so you become a more perfect person. It is like with children in a family; they sometimes fight with each other, and in that way they learn what is right and wrong.”



THE OLDEST monk living at Our Lady of Dallas is 70-year-old Father Da-mian Szodenyi, the first headmaster of Cistercian. Born in Hungary of German parents, Damian holds degrees in literature, philology and art history. He entered the Cistercian order when he was 17 and was ordained as a priest eight years later.

Drafted into the Hungarian Army in 1943, Damian served as a chaplain in a field hospital on the Russian front. “We were fighting for the right cause – against Communism -but we lost,” he says. “We fought with the Germans not because they were Nazis, but because they were against Communism.”

Damian showed early talent as a writer, but after the Communists took over Hungary in 1946, he saw that the life he had envisioned for himself-teaching freely, thinking and writing -was no longer possible in his native land. He went to England, where he was unable to support himself, and then on to America, to the same monastery outside Milwaukee where Anselm Nagy was living.

When the University of Dallas opened, Damian became dean of men and taught Latin and psychology. Later, when Cistercian opened, he was asked to be headmaster and served in that position until 1968. He did not enjoy the work.

“I am just not the type that can work and make other people work, too,” he says. There is still regret in his voice. “I am not a motivator. It’s sergeant’s work, not worthy for an intelligent man to do.” His eyes twinkle. “I’m sure it’s a beautiful job for some people, but I couldn’t get any satisfaction. I think that power corrupts, and I’ve always tried to avoid it all I could.”

During those years at the helm of Cistercian, Damian’s mind was often elsewhere. He had given up hopes of writing in his adopted tongue, which he had begun learning when he was 32. “I couldn’t master English the way I mastered Hungarian,” he says. “So many beautiful and fragrant words you learn in your teens. There was a creative urge trying to come through in my writing, but I suffered a lot.”

So he sought another creative outlet: art. He did his first painting and sculpture at age 50, after watching some UD students in an art class. His work today is bold and arresting. He can wrestle a length of mesquite into a haunting, suffering Christ or tease the faint features of Mary from a lump of rose quartz.

“When I saw that I could do the art, I was saved,” Damian says. “I could get this thing out of me. There were many technical things to learn, but it was easier than the language. This has been the happiest period of my life.”

For Damian, inspiration, not technique, is most important for the artist. Much of his work might be dismissed as “unfinished” or “unpolished” by the uninformed, but that is his method: He looks for “something of God’s intention” in a piece of stone or wood, then works to bring that divine purpose to the surface. “I’m not the kind of artist who is working for details,” he says. “If I get the essence, which I am inspired to do, I stop.”

Many artists, Damian says, “over-refine” their works under pressure to sell. In the monastery, of course, no such commercial forces exist. He sells enough for his subsistence each year; then, when that quota is met, he may stop selling. He rarely exhibits his work, though he has had invitations from Washington, D.C., and Europe. He is not bothered by his obscurity. “My work satisfies me,” he says. “I wouldn’t have gone into the vocation of a priest and a monk if 1 [had] wanted to be famous.”

Damian once placed a primitive-looking statue called Spiritual Singer in the abbey’s hallway, only to find its mouth stuffed with toilet paper the next day; but other than this silent referendum, his art has provoked little controversy, though many of his works are quite unorthodox. “But if you must do something, you don’t care what people think about it,” he says. “You just go on doing it.”



“WE ARE growing old, and that means the number of working fathers goes down,” Nagy says. He is a happy man, but he worries about his monastery, in which the average member is 54 years old. “This is both spiritually and financially a great loss,” he says. “A Cistercian school should have Cistercian fathers teaching in that school. They give the school its spirit.”

The decline of vocations to monastic orders has been part of a worldwide trend during the past two decades. No group of monks can do much to reverse it; the Cistercians can only hope for broader social changes that will again make the monastic life attractive. Ironically, the horror of World War II brought many young people into abbeys, seeking some still point in a chaotic world. Nagy says that during the last five years, the number of new vocations in the Cistercian order has begun to inch upward.

Brother Timothy, 24, is the youngest member of Our Lady of Dallas. A former student at Texas A&M, he was born in Daingerfield, Texas. He was 21 when he came to the abbey during his spring break from college. If the Cistercian order is to survive, its future belongs to people like him.

The first question, of course, is “Why?”. Why did he choose to throw off the influences of his narcissistic society and walk out of the 20th century?

Timothy’s speech is full of thoughtful pauses. He radiates sincerity. “Down at A&M, I had a great time. I really did,” he says. “But I wanted to spend my life for what was ultimately true and would ultimately last. I wanted everything in my daily life consciously directed toward my final end. The other life seems absurd in light of the final end. Jobs, family, having a nice house…. It all seems like avoiding the real issue.”

For Timothy, the “sexual milieu” of contemporary society is the cause of the decline in vocations to the monastery. “So many young people think this whole life of basic pleasure is due them,” he says. “They see it as the way of fulfilling themselves, as if there’s no other option.” But Timothy does not see the monastery as an escape from sexuality. “You can’t turn your back on it,” he says. “You learn that here. You have to meet it head-on by living with yourself and trying to remain faithful to that vow. Like any man -or 90 percent of men – I’m attracted to a beautiful woman. But the way sex is exploited today degrades the human person. Instead of caring for a person, you’re caring for a pleasure that person can give you.”

Like the other monks at Our Lady of Dallas, Timothy lives with his choices. He has no regrets. “I know that I won’t partake in many good ways of being and living,” he says, “but in the last analysis, everything else drops out. Christ becomes your reason for living.”