Boston Globe
by Michael Paulson
Tuesday, August 28, 2001, page B1
Community of Jesus seeks to reinvent monastic life
ORLEANS— Four times a day, men and women wearing beige and green vestments file into their grand new basilica, filling the nave with the a cappella sounds of the psalms, sung in Latin, in Gregorian chant.
From prayer, Richard Laraja heads off to his law practice, Lillian Miao to run a $3.5 million publishing house, Christy Haig to home-school her children, Sister Gabriella Guyer to research Latin translation.
But their lives are permanently interwoven.
In a highly individualistic society, they choose to live together in a regimented community; in a highly sexualized culture, about one-fourth choose to be celibate.
This is the Community of Jesus, a multidenominational monastic community that is surely one of the most unusual religious experiments on the American scene. Once accused of being a cult, the Community of Jesus is increasingly being compared instead to a handful of thriving religious communities around the world where Christians seeking a greater degree of interconnectedness and a life permeated by faith are reinventing monastic life for a contemporary world.
Today, their biggest project is making mosaics, frescoes, and stone sculptures to adorn their new basilica along Rock Harbor, where mornings bring fishing enthusiasts to charter boats, midday brings hungry beachgoers to the harborside seafood shack, and evening draws people from across the Cape to catch the famous sunset.
Professional cult-watchers are still concerned, but today religious leaders most often compare the Community of Jesus not to the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, but to the ecumenical monks of Taize, France, whose chanted candlelight prayer services are influencing Protestant and Catholic churches around the United States.
Monastic order seeks a new way of life
“This is a very important community in the sense that, at its heart, it’s a kind of revival of monastic life,” said the Rev. Thomas Fitzgerald, a Greek Orthodox theologian in Brookline who has been monitoring the Community of Jesus for 10 years. “Places like this are delving into the deeper roots of historical monasticism, but also trying to make that monastic witness contemporary and relevant.”
The Rev. Romanus Cessario, the Catholic liaison to the Community of Jesus, makes a similar comparison, saying, “They’re certainly an experiment, but an experiment which has analogues elsewhere.”
Those kind of comments denote a remarkable turnabout for a church that has been viewed with hostility and skepticism since it was established in 1970 by the followers of two Episcopalian laywomen who had been teaching and hosting Bible study in Orleans since they met in 1958.
In the 1970s, Christian periodicals accused the church of being an unhealthy refuge for wealthy Episcopalians and Presbyterians; in the 1980s, a group including some of the founders’ children defected and charged the church with mind control and psychological abuse; and in the 1990s, while it was embroiled in a legal battle with the Cape Cod Commission over the scale of its proposed basilica, a television newsmagazine reported allegations that the church was a destructive cult.
Steve Hassan, a Boston specialist on cults and a counselor for ex-members, said he’s convinced that a decade ago, the Community of Jesus was a destructive cult, based on interviews with former members who complained of mind control and psychological abuse, especially when they wanted to leave.
But Hassan said that over the last five years, he has not heard any complaints about the church and is unwilling to characterize it.
Members of the Community of Jesus have won posts as heads of the local Chamber of Commerce and clergy association, as well as of the national Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. The head of the Massachusetts Council of Churches spoke at the dedication of the basilica, and a member of the Community of Jesus serves on the council’s board.
“What I experience is a very caring community, a very faith-filled community that exercises the gift of hospitality and the gift of prayer,” said the Rev. Jane Watt, the region’s top Presbyterian official as presbyter of the Presbytery of Southern New England. Watt visits the Community of Jesus once or twice a year for her own personal spiritual retreat.
Local clergy, courted by the Community of Jesus, have also been won over. “When I first came here, a minister from the Community of Jesus came to visit with me, and I was very upfront, saying that I’d heard these stories about them, and was concerned,” said the Rev. Kent D. Moorehead, minister of the Orleans United Methodist Church. “But I see no sign of any kind of cult. A parishioner of mine had a family member who was part of the community and decided to leave, and they just left — it was no problem.”
The church has about 85 celibates who live in a convent and a friary, and another 240 adults and children who live in about 30 nearby dwellings, often three families to a house. Those numbers have been flat in recent years, but the community says it has as many members as it can handle and is not seeking to grow.
The church’s sense of its own identity has evolved, especially since the death of one of the founders in 1988. Today, it calls itself an ecumenical Benedictine monastery. The community has chosen liturgical and architectural styles associated with early Christianity, before the East-West split and the Protestant Reformation, so that all Christians can claim the style as common religious heritage.
The celibate nuns and monks, married families, and ordained clergy from across the Christian denominational spectrum proclaim their faith not only through frequent, high church worship, but also through the arts. The church boasts a highly regarded choir, marching band, and theater as well as a small, successful Christian publishing house, Paraclete Press, that has recently launched a mystery series set at a fictionalized Community of Jesus.
Some members say they were drawn by the charisma of the founders; others by the emphasis on the arts, or by a desire to live in a community defined by faith.
“As long as I can remember, I’d had some attraction to community life, and I found here people who took their Christianity, their relationship with God, seriously, and who had a deep desire to grow,” said the Rev. Martin Shannon, an Episcopal priest who serves on the clerical staff at the Community of Jesus.
Sister Guyer, who joined the church in 1977, said she was searching for spirituality that wasn’t present during her secular upbringing.
“I literally saw a light in the face of the people here, and it was something I wanted,” Sister Guyer said. “It was definitely a response to a call from God.”
The community is highly disciplined. The men are all clean-shaven. The women wear long skirts, short hair, and minimal makeup. The church avows a Bible-based morality and frowns on sex outside of marriage, meaning sexually active homosexuals are not welcome.
The church says it finances itself through mandatory tithing and voluntary gifts.
Families are required to support themselves; the wealthier own the houses and share them with the less affluent members.
Not only do many church members have day jobs in town, but they also socialize with non-members of the community. Some of the children are home-schooled, but the majority attend either parochial, private, or public schools.
“I’m local color, just like a fisherman, or a builder or anything else,” said Laraja, the lawyer who also maintains a relationship with the local Catholic church.
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