New Look for St. John's

St. Benedict was the spiritual founder of all monasteries. On the summit of Italy's Monte Cassino, 14 centuries ago, where pagans had raised a shrine to Apollo. Benedict gathered around him a group of fellow Roman Catholics to withdraw from the world and yet be a part of it. He wrote them a rule of useful work and communal worship and solitary contemplation that has been a model of monastic discipline everywhere and ever since.

Last week, as they have for centuries of pestilence and peace and rumor of the world's destruction, the Benedictines were busy building their hives of holy industry around the world. On Monte Cassino, St. Benedict's greatest monastery, laid waste in World War II for the fourth time in its history, was about rebuilt again. And on 2,500 rolling acres at Collegeville, Minn., about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis, work was getting under way on a Benedictine abbey which the editor of Liturgical Arts magazine has called "truly a milestone in the evolution of the architecture of the Catholic Church."

Modest Man. For those who think of the cloistered life as a dark anachronism from the Middle Ages, the new St. John's Abbey and University will be a vivid testimony to the way the life of the spirit leaps from century to century and is contemporary in each. It is being designed by one of the brightest-burning lights of modern architecture--Hungarian-born Marcel Breuer, 51, who learned his disciplined economy of line and plane at Walter Gropius' famed Bauhaus in the '20s, and developed it into one of the most flexible and creative styles on U.S. drawing boards.

Architect Breuer was chosen to design the new St. John's by a six-man committee of monks, appointed by Abbot Baldwin Dworschak, who went about their undertaking with Benedictine thoroughness. After 18 months of regular meetings, they invited a group of top architects to come to Collegeville and talk things over. Breuer's selection was based almost as much on human values as on technical ones. Said Abbot Baldwin: "He struck us as being not only an outstanding architect, but as a simple, straightforward, sincere and rather humble person."

No Rush. Breuer's plans for the 19 new buildings that will make up the new St. John's include a fresh conception of cloisters. Instead of running along the side of a building, as cloisters have done since St. Benedict, they will be independent covered walks, mostly of local fieldstone on the outer side, roofed with reinforced concrete and glass-walled or open on the inner side to provide views of the gardens and landscaping. Said one monk: "This is a great improvement over traditional Benedictine architecture, where buildings are always so planned that if a fire starts it can spread immediately in all directions."

The whole project may cost about $8,000,000, and since the sum is far beyond St. John's likely early means, its completion may be far in the future. But Abbot Baldwin and his black-cowled brothers are in no mad rush. "After all," he said last week, "what are a few generations to the Benedictines?"

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