Today, the Cistercian Order pauses to remember Saints Robert of Molesme, Alberic of Cîteaux, and Stephen Harding—three men whose lives, taken together, gave birth not simply to a reform, but to a way of listening to God that has endured across nine centuries. For the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Silence, Mountheaton, this feast is not an exercise in memory alone. It is a living reckoning with origins, a quiet return to the well from which the monastery still draws its life.
What binds Robert, Alberic, and Stephen is not a taste for novelty, nor a desire to break from the Church of their time, but a shared refusal to allow the Gospel to be softened by comfort or dulled by habit. When Robert led a small band away from Molesme into the desolation of Cîteaux in 1098, he was not founding something new so much as removing what had gathered around the Rule of Saint Benedict. His longing was direct and uncompromising: to live the Rule as it stood, without mitigation, without embellishment, without excuse. It was a return rather than a rebellion, and that instinct still lies at the heart of Cistercian life.
Alberic followed Robert into that beginning of hardship and obscurity, and it was Alberic who ensured that the fragile vision did not collapse under its own severity. He gave shape and steadiness to the reform, clothing the monks in undyed wool as an outward sign of inward poverty, insisting that simplicity be visible as well as professed. He sought protection from Rome not to gain influence, but to secure freedom from interference, so that the community could remain poor, hidden, and faithful. In Alberic, Mountheaton can recognise the quiet labour of perseverance—the often unseen work of guarding fidelity day after day, long after the drama of beginnings has faded.
Stephen Harding brought yet another grace to Cîteaux: a far-seeing sense of communion. A pilgrim by temperament and an Englishman by birth, Stephen understood that a reform rooted only in one place would wither. Through the Charter of Charity, he bound monasteries together not through domination but through shared observance, mutual correction, and fraternal care. Unity was preserved without uniformity, authority exercised without coercion, and charity made concrete through accountability. In Stephen’s vision, the Cistercian family became something living and relational, capable of stretching across countries and centuries without losing its soul.
From the marshlands of Burgundy to the quiet fields of Ireland, the inheritance of these saints has never been merely structural. It is a spiritual instinct that continues to echo in 2026 at Our Lady of Silence, Mountheaton. It is the conviction that God is met most truthfully in attentiveness rather than noise, that prayer deepens as life is simplified, and that obedience, when lived honestly, becomes a school of freedom rather than constraint. In a culture saturated with speech and urgency, the vow of silence remains quietly prophetic. In a world that prizes visibility and output, the hidden rhythm of prayer, work, and stability still speaks with unsettling clarity.
This feast does not merely celebrate Cistercian identity; it interrogates it. It asks whether the monastery still exists for the reason Cîteaux did—to seek God wholeheartedly, together, under a rule and an abbot, in a life stripped back to what is essential. It asks whether silence is still guarded as a space for encounter, whether charity remains strong enough to correct and to forgive, and whether simplicity continues to be chosen not as austerity for its own sake, but as availability to God.
As #OLS prepares to honour these founders, it does so not by looking back with nostalgia, but by standing within their unfinished work. The Abbey of Our Lady of Silence is not a monument to the past, but a living chapter in the same story, written now in fidelity, patience, restraint, and hope. The God who drew three men into a marsh in 1098 still calls monks today into a silence where His word can be heard and His mercy received.
Saints Robert, Alberic, and Stephen, humble seekers and faithful servants, you who chose poverty so that nothing might obscure God, you who loved silence so that His voice could be heard, you who bound communities together in charity rather than power, pray for us. Pray for this monastery of Our Lady of Silence, for its monks, for their perseverance in prayer, their honesty in conversion, and their courage to remain faithful in small, hidden ways. Teach us again how to return—to the Rule, to the Gospel, to the simplicity that makes room for grace. May your intercession keep this house rooted in silence, rich in mercy, and steadfast in hope, until all seeking is fulfilled in the vision of God, who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.