The Post-Vatican-II Catholic Apophatic and Mystical Revival: Beyond Centering Prayer

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From: The Hidden Fire

Dossier extending the Christian-apophatic corpus into the post-conciliar Catholic contemplative revival that runs alongside and beyond the Centering Prayer movement -- the Carmelite scholarly and pastoral revival (Iain Matthew, Gillian Ahlgren, Constance FitzGerald, Kees Waaijman), the Benedictine renewal (Joan Chittister and the Erie reform wing; Cyprian Consiglio and the Camaldolese interfaith line descended from Bede Griffiths and Abhishiktananda), and the Cistercian post-Merton continuation (Andre Louf, Michael Casey, the monastic-theology recovery, and Monastic Interreligious Dialogue). Framed by the Vatican II ressourcement mandate (Perfectae Caritatis) and the 1989 CDF disciplinary boundary (Orationis Formas). Neutral scholarly register, present-all-sides, with a frank what-cannot-be-covered close.
Contents 36 sections

Why this dossier exists

This dossier is a direct extension of Christian Apophatic Theology and Hesychast Practice. That dossier maps the apophatic line from Dionysius forward and closes its contemporary section (Topic 4) on the Western contemplative revival with a heavily Centering-Prayer-and-CAC-weighted account: Merton, Keating, Bourgeault, Rohr, Finley, with the Carmelite and Benedictine contemporary material treated in a paragraph each.

That weighting reflects the actual public visibility of the movements. Centering Prayer, Contemplative Outreach, and Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation are the loudest contemporary faces of Catholic contemplative practice in the Anglophone world, and the Eastern Orthodox critique of them is the most-documented live dispute. But the visibility is misleading. The post-conciliar Catholic contemplative revival is substantially larger and older than the Centering Prayer method (developed only in the early 1970s), and its scholarly and monastic core – the part that carries the actual apophatic inheritance of John of the Cross, the Cloud, and the desert – runs on different institutional rails.

This dossier documents that core. It covers three threads the parent dossier leaves thin:

  1. The Carmelite revival – the scholarly-pastoral recovery of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross through the Institute of Carmelite Studies, the Teresianum in Rome, the Titus Brandsma Institute in Nijmegen, and a cohort of contemporary specialist-practitioners: Iain Matthew, Gillian Ahlgren, Constance FitzGerald, and Kees Waaijman.
  2. The Benedictine renewal – which splits into a reform-and-democratization wing (Joan Chittister and the Erie Benedictines; “monasteries without walls”) and an interfaith-contemplative wing (Cyprian Consiglio and the Camaldolese, carrying the lineage of Bede Griffiths, Abhishiktananda, and the Christian-ashram experiment, and the John Main / World Community for Christian Meditation line).
  3. The Cistercian post-Merton continuation – what the Trappist and Trappistine order did with its contemplative inheritance after Merton’s death in 1968: the monastic-theology recovery (Andre Louf, Michael Casey), the lectio divina renewal, the Cistercian Publications scholarly apparatus, and the interreligious dialogue institutionalized through Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and the Gethsemani Encounters.

The connective tissue is the Second Vatican Council. The council did not invent Catholic contemplative practice, but it issued the mandate – Perfectae Caritatis (1965) – that ordered every religious institute to return to the sources of its founding charism, and it universalized the call to contemplation in Lumen Gentium’s chapter on the universal call to holiness. Both wings of this revival, the scholarly-recovery wing and the popular-catechetical wing, understand themselves as executing that mandate. The 1989 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith letter Orationis Formas supplies the disciplinary boundary the same mandate ran up against. The framing section below documents both.

The dossier follows the corpus convention: neutral scholarly register, BC/AD, inline sourced links per claim, present-all-sides on the live disputes, and a frank statement of what cannot be reconstructed from open sources.

1. The engine – Vatican II and the return to sources

Perfectae Caritatis and the ressourcement mandate

The decree Perfectae Caritatis (“Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life”) was promulgated by Paul VI on 28 October 1965, passing the assembled bishops by a vote of 2,321 to 4 (Wikipedia: Perfectae Caritatis). Its operative principle is stated in article 2: renewal “includes both the constant return to the sources of all Christian life and to the original inspiration behind a given community and their adaptation to the changed conditions of our time” (Vatican: Perfectae Caritatis).

This is the ressourcement logic – the return to sources that also animated the mid-century patristic and liturgical recovery – applied to the internal life of the orders. Each institute was directed to recover the “original spirit” of its founder and founding rule and then to adapt. The consequence, played out over the following six decades, was that the contemplative orders re-examined their own primary literature: the Carmelites returned to Teresa and John and the desert-Elijah charism; the Benedictines to the Rule and the patristic monastic authors; the Cistercians to Bernard, William of Saint-Thierry, Aelred, and the twelfth-century “monastic theology” that Jean Leclercq had recovered.

Leclercq’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture – originally a series of lectures to young monks at the Institute of Monastic Studies at Sant’Anselmo in Rome in the winter of 1955-56, published in French in 1957 (L’Amour des lettres et le desir de Dieu, Editions du Cerf) and in English translation by Catharine Misrahi in 1961 – is the intellectual charter of the monastic-theology recovery (Fordham University Press; Internet Archive). Leclercq’s argument – that monastic theology is a distinct genre from scholastic theology, oriented to sapientia (savored wisdom) rather than scientia, and grounded in lectio divina – became the self-understanding the post-conciliar contemplative orders adopted in place of the neo-scholastic manuals.

The universal call to holiness

The second conciliar driver is Lumen Gentium’s chapter 5, “The Universal Call to Holiness in the Church” (1964), which taught that “all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity” – not only vowed religious (Vatican: Lumen Gentium). This doctrinal move is the theological warrant for the entire lay-contemplative movement: if contemplation is not the reserved specialty of the cloister but the birthright of every baptized person, then the monastic orders have an obligation to teach it outward. Keating’s Centering Prayer, Chittister’s “Monasteries of the Heart,” Consiglio’s “universal call to contemplation,” and John Main’s lay meditation groups all cite this doctrine, explicitly or implicitly, as the justification for carrying enclosed contemplative practice to lay practitioners.

Orationis Formas: the disciplinary boundary

The same outward movement – especially where it borrowed technique from Hindu and Buddhist meditation – drew a magisterial caution. On 15 October 1989 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) with Archbishop Alberto Bovone as secretary, issued the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, known by its incipit Orationis Formas (Vatican: Orationis Formas; Wikipedia: Aspects of Christian meditation). The letter warns against confusing Christian prayer, which is always relational and directed to a personal God, with the psychosomatic techniques and impersonal absorption of Eastern methods, and cautions that bodily technique (breath, posture) must not be treated as producing grace mechanically.

The letter names no movement, but it is the boundary marker for everything in this dossier that touches the Christian-Hindu and Christian-Buddhist frontier – the Camaldolese ashram line, John Main’s maranatha method, the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue exchanges, and (in the reception literature) Centering Prayer itself. It is the modern successor to the seventeenth-century Quietist condemnations documented in the parent dossier’s Topic 6: the standing magisterial reservation against a contemplative practice that pushes toward technique-driven passivity or toward dissolution of the Creator-creature relation. The 2003 Pontifical Councils’ document Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the “New Age” extended the same caution to the wider spiritual-marketplace context.

The revival documented below runs in the space between these two magisterial poles: mandated to return to its contemplative sources and to teach them outward, cautioned against dissolving them into generic technique.

2. The Carmelite revival

The institutional apparatus

The Carmelite family has two branches: the Discalced Carmelites (OCD), Teresa and John’s sixteenth-century reform, and the Order of Carmelites of the Ancient Observance (O. Carm.), the older unreformed trunk. Both run scholarly-contemplative institutions that are the engine of the modern Carmelite revival.

  • The Institute of Carmelite Studies (ICS Publications), Washington, DC, is the principal Anglophone Discalced Carmelite publishing house. Its Kavanaugh-Rodriguez Collected Works of Teresa (three volumes, 1976-1985) and of John of the Cross (1979, revised 1991) are the universally cited critical English translations and are the textual foundation on which the entire Anglophone revival rests (ICS Publications).
  • The Pontifical Theological Faculty Teresianum, Rome, is the Discalced Carmelites’ pontifical faculty of spiritual theology and the principal graduate-training institution for the field (Teresianum).
  • The Titus Brandsma Institute, Nijmegen, founded in 1967 as a collaboration between the (then) Catholic University of Nijmegen and the Dutch Carmelite Province, is the O. Carm. scholarly center and the principal European academic engine for the discipline of “spirituality” as a distinct field (interview with Kees Waaijman, Acta Theologica).

The revival was punctuated by a run of anniversaries – the 1970 declaration of Teresa as the first female Doctor of the Church, the fifth centenary of Teresa’s birth in 2015, and the associated jubilee years – that generated conferences, translations, and popular publishing across the whole period.

Titus Brandsma (1881-1942): the institute’s namesake and the scholar-martyr model

The Nijmegen institute is named for Titus Brandsma (born Anno Sjoerd Brandsma, 23 February 1881), the Dutch Carmelite (O. Carm.) priest, philosopher, and journalist who was Professor of Philosophy and of the History of Mysticism at the Catholic University of Nijmegen and served a term as its Rector Magnificus (Wikipedia: Titus Brandsma; O. Carm.: St. Titus Brandsma). Brandsma’s academic project – the historical study of Dutch and Rhineland mysticism (the Devotio Moderna, Ruusbroec, the Rhineland line) – is a direct antecedent of the discipline Kees Waaijman later formalized at the institute that bears his name. His outspoken opposition to Nazi ideology and his defense of the Catholic press led to his arrest in January 1942 and his death at Dachau on 26 July 1942 by lethal injection administered as part of the camp’s medical-experimentation program. He was beatified as a martyr in 1985 and canonized by Francis on 15 May 2022 (Vatican News: “Titus Brandsma: journalist, martyr, saint of the 20th century”). Brandsma is the twentieth-century Carmelite figure who most completely fuses the scholarly recovery of the mystical tradition with the lived contemplative-and-martyr witness – the O. Carm. counterpart to the Discalced Edith Stein (documented in the parent dossier), the two of them the Carmelite family’s paired scholar-martyrs of Nazi Europe.

Iain Matthew (b. 1960)

Iain Scott Matthew is a British Discalced Carmelite, born in Windsor on 28 January 1960, who entered the OCD novitiate at Oxford in 1978 and made first profession in 1979 (Teresianum faculty page). He took a theology degree at Durham (1984), studied for a year on the John of the Cross course at the Centro Internacional Sanjuanista in Avila (1988-89), and completed an Oxford D.Phil. in 1991 – “The knowledge and consciousness of Christ in the light of the writings of St John of the Cross,” directed by Edward Yarnold, SJ, and Rowan Williams. He now teaches spiritual theology and John of the Cross at the Teresianum in Rome.

His The Impact of God: Soundings from St John of the Cross (Hodder & Stoughton, 1995; reissued 2010) is the standard contemporary spiritual-theological distillation of John for a general readership and is the single most-recommended entry point to John in English pastoral use (Carmelite Book Service). Its argument – that John’s apophatic “nights” are not primarily ascetical technique but the record of God’s transforming self-communication, “impact,” to a soul that consents – reframes the Dark Night away from the psychologized “dark night of the soul” of popular usage and back toward its theological content. His later John of the Cross: Seasons of Prayer (2014) extends the pastoral application. Matthew is the clearest case of the revival’s specialist-practitioner type: a vowed member of the order with a research doctorate, writing simultaneously for the academy and for lay contemplatives.

Gillian Ahlgren (b. 1959)

Gillian T. W. Ahlgren is Professor of Theology and Church History at Xavier University in Cincinnati and founding director of its Institute for Spirituality and Social Justice; she is one of the leading Anglophone scholars of Teresa of Avila (Enkindling Love / author site; Fortress Press author page). Her trajectory runs from critical-historical scholarship to constructive contemplative pedagogy:

  • Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Cornell University Press, 1996) is the historical-critical study of how Teresa negotiated the Spanish Inquisition’s suspicion of female visionary authority and of the alumbrados – the political conditions under which a woman could write mystical theology in Counter-Reformation Spain (Cornell / listing).
  • The Inquisition of Francisca: A Sixteenth-Century Visionary on Trial (University of Chicago Press, 2005) edits and translates a related inquisitorial record.
  • Entering Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle: A Reader’s Companion (Paulist Press, 2005) turns to pedagogy – a guided reading of the Moradas for contemporary practitioners.
  • Enkindling Love: The Legacy of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross (Fortress Press, “Mapping the Tradition” series, 2016) interleaves the seven dwelling-places of the Interior Castle with passages from John’s Dark Night, Spiritual Canticle, and Living Flame to present the two Carmelite doctors as a single integrated itinerary of transformation (Fortress Press; Reading Religion review).
  • The Tenderness of God: Reclaiming Our Humanity (Fortress, 2021) is the more recent constructive-spirituality work.

Ahlgren represents the academic-lay wing of the Carmelite revival – a university theologian, not a vowed Carmelite, who carries the critical scholarship into a contemplative pedagogy for lay and ecumenical readers.

Constance FitzGerald (b. 1933) and the “impasse” reframing

Constance FitzGerald is a Discalced Carmelite nun of the Baltimore Carmel and the most theologically consequential contemporary reader of John of the Cross’s dark-night doctrine in the American context. Her 1984 essay “Impasse and Dark Night” – originally delivered and published in Living with Apocalypse: Spiritual Resources for Social Compassion, edited by Tilden H. Edwards (Harper & Row, 1984) – reinterprets John’s “dark night” as a category applicable not only to individual mystical development but to collective and societal “impasse”: situations in which every rational way forward is blocked and the only opening is a contemplative, non-rational reception (Institute for Communal Contemplation and Dialogue: “Impasse and the Dark Night”).

FitzGerald’s move – applying the apophatic dark-night structure to feminist, ecological, and social-crisis contexts – has become one of the most cited frames in contemporary Anglophone spiritual theology. Her collected work was gathered in Desire, Darkness, and Hope: Theology in a Time of Impasse: Engaging the Thought of Constance FitzGerald, OCD, edited by Laurie Cassidy and M. Shawn Copeland (Liturgical Press, 2021), a 469-page volume pairing seven of her articles with responsive essays by ten theologians (Liturgical Press; Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality). FitzGerald is the strongest case in the corpus for the apophatic tradition being extended, from inside the cloister, into a socially and politically engaged register without losing its Carmelite doctrinal anchor.

Kees Waaijman (b. 1942) and the disciplinization of spirituality

Kees Waaijman, O. Carm., is the Dutch Carmelite who did more than anyone to turn “spirituality” into a formal academic discipline. He held the chair in spirituality at Radboud University (Nijmegen) from 1985 and directed the Titus Brandsma Institute from 1999 to 2007 (interview, Acta Theologica; Project MUSE: “Spirituality Studies as a Discipline: The Contribution of Kees Waaijman”). His major work, Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods (Dutch 2000; English translation by John Vriend, 2002; subsequently translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian), is the standard methodological reference for the field – a systematic account of spirituality’s forms (lived, schools, counter-movements), foundations, and research methods (Festschrift notice, O. Carm.). Waaijman is the O. Carm. counterweight to the ICS/OCD publishing axis: where the Discalced branch’s revival is text-and-practice centered (translate the doctors, teach the prayer), the Ancient Observance branch’s contribution through the Titus Brandsma Institute is meta-disciplinary – establishing the scholarly apparatus by which contemplative traditions are studied at all.

The translator-scholars and the wider field

The revival rests on a substrate of translator-scholars and specialists that includes Kieran Kavanaugh (d. 2019) and Otilio Rodriguez, the ICS translators of Teresa and John; Keith J. Egan (O. Carm.), the Notre Dame / Saint Mary’s Carmelite-studies scholar; Steven Payne (OCD), longtime ICS editor; and Mary Frohlich (Catholic Theological Union), the principal contemporary Carmelite mystical-theology monographer, whose The Intersubjectivity of the Mystic: A Study of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle (Scholars Press, 1993) is documented in the parent dossier. Frohlich is the natural bridge figure between the two dossiers: she also edited FitzGerald’s material and works the contemporary Carmelite reception directly.

3. The Benedictine Renewal

The Benedictine response to Perfectae Caritatis forked. One branch turned the return-to-sources mandate toward reform, democratization, and lay extension of the Rule; the other turned it toward interfaith contemplative exchange. Joan Chittister is the exemplar of the first; Cyprian Consiglio and the Camaldolese of the second. Both wings share the Collegeville / Liturgical Press publishing infrastructure and the Leclercq monastic-theology self-understanding.

The scholarly substrate: RB1980 and Collegeville

The post-conciliar Benedictine recovery of its own sources is anchored in RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes, edited by Timothy Fry, OSB, and a team, and published by Liturgical Press (Collegeville, Minnesota) in 1981 – the standard critical-and-pastoral edition of the Rule that made the founding text newly available with full scholarly apparatus (Liturgical Press). Liturgical Press and the associated Cistercian Publications (see Section 4) are the shared publishing engine of the whole Benedictine-Cistercian revival.

Joan Chittister (b. 1936): the reform wing

Joan D. Chittister is a Benedictine sister of Mount Saint Benedict Monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania, and among the most widely read and most publicly contested Catholic religious of her generation (Benedictine Sisters of Erie; About Joan Chittister). She served twelve years as prioress of the Erie community, as president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses, and as president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) – the umbrella body for U.S. women’s institutes that would later be the subject of a 2009-2015 Vatican doctrinal assessment. She is the author of more than sixty books.

Chittister’s contribution to the contemplative revival is the systematic re-presentation of Benedictine spirituality as a template for lay life:

  • Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today (Harper & Row, 1990) reads the Rule’s monastic virtues – stability, obedience, humility, community – as resources for ordinary secular existence.
  • The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century (Crossroad, in its “Spiritual Legacy” and later editions) is her running commentary on the Rule.
  • The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life (BlueBridge, 2011) is the manifesto and core curriculum for the “monasteries without walls” idea (joanchittister.org).

The institutional expression is Monasteries of the Heart, an online movement created and animated by Chittister and run by the Erie Benedictines, which offers formation in the core Benedictine elements – prayer, lectio, good works, study, community – to a reported membership of some 20,000 people internationally who are not vowed religious (Monasteries of the Heart; joanchittister.org: Monasteries of the Heart). This is Lumen Gentium’s universal call to holiness operationalized as a distributed, dues-optional, internet-mediated quasi-monastic community.

Chittister is also the wing of the revival most in tension with Roman authority. Her advocacy on women’s ordination and church governance placed her at the center of the reform debate; her positions are characterized by supporters as prophetic renewal and by critics as dissent, and this dossier records the contest without adjudicating it. The relevant point for the contemplative-revival argument is structural: the reform wing carries the Benedictine contemplative charism outward to laypeople while simultaneously pressing the institutional Church on governance, and the two commitments are, for Chittister, a single project.

Cyprian Consiglio (b. 1958) and the Camaldolese interfaith line

Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam. (born Phillip Daniel Consiglio, 19 June 1958, near Joliet, Illinois), is an American Camaldolese Benedictine monk, priest, composer, and interreligious-dialogue teacher. A professional musician in Phoenix before entering religious life, he was elected prior of New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California, in July 2013, reconfirmed in 2018, and completed his term in January 2024, returning to music, writing, and interfaith work (Wikipedia: Cyprian Consiglio; Notes from Stillsong: election as prior).

The Camaldolese are the eremitical reform of the Benedictine family founded by Romuald of Ravenna around 1023 AD, combining community, solitude, and (in Romuald’s “threefold good”) evangelization. New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur (founded 1958 as Immaculate Heart Hermitage) is their principal American house and, with its Berkeley dependency Incarnation Monastery and the New Camaldoli circle documented in the parent dossier (Bruno Barnhart, Robert Hale), the principal North American Benedictine contemplative-Wisdom node.

Consiglio’s Prayer in the Cave of the Heart: The Universal Call to Contemplation (Liturgical Press, 2010) is the compact statement of the Camaldolese interfaith-contemplative position: an accessible theology of prayer explicitly built on Bede Griffiths’s “universal call to contemplation,” bringing the contemplative traditions of East and West into contact (Liturgical Press). The title’s “cave of the heart” is drawn directly from the Indian-Christian ashram vocabulary of the Camaldolese lineage he stands in.

That lineage is the significant part. The Camaldolese Congregation received into its structure, in 1980, the Saccidananda Ashram (Shantivanam) in Tamil Nadu – the “forest of peace” Christian ashram founded in 1950 by the French priest Jules Monchanin and the French Benedictine Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda) to unite Indian sannyasa with Benedictine monasticism, and taken over in 1968 by the English Benedictine Bede Griffiths (Swami Dayananda) (Wikipedia: Bede Griffiths; Wikipedia: Saccidananda Ashram; bedegriffiths.com: origins, the three pioneers). Under Griffiths, Shantivanam became an internationally known center of Hindu-Christian contemplative dialogue; its 1980 reception into the Camaldolese Congregation is the institutional link that makes Consiglio’s Big Sur hermitage and Griffiths’s Tamil Nadu ashram branches of one order. Abhishiktananda’s own writings (Prayer, Saccidananda, The Further Shore) are the primary literature of the Christian-advaita frontier – and the exact frontier the 1989 Orationis Formas letter was written to patrol. The Camaldolese interfaith wing is thus simultaneously the boldest edge of the Benedictine revival and its most magisterially scrutinized.

The John Main / WCCM line

The other principal Benedictine lay-contemplative movement – the John Main maranatha meditation method and the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) carried forward by Laurence Freeman, OSB, with chapters in over a hundred countries – is documented in the parent dossier’s Topic 4. It belongs here as the third Benedictine wing: neither reform-democratizing (Chittister) nor ashram-interfaith (Consiglio/Griffiths) but a single-technique lay-meditation network built on Cassian’s Conference X and a continuously repeated prayer-word. Main (1926-1982) drew the method partly from an early encounter with a Hindu teacher in Malaya, which is precisely why the WCCM has taken care to root its public rationale in Cassian and the desert rather than in the Eastern encounter – the same Orationis Formas boundary again.

4. The Cistercian post-Merton continuation

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is documented in the parent dossier as the single most consequential Anglophone Catholic contemplative writer of the twentieth century. This section documents what the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OCSO, the Trappists and Trappistines) did with its contemplative inheritance after Merton’s accidental death in Bangkok in December 1968. The short answer: the order did not mainly follow Merton’s late interreligious turn. Its center of gravity moved instead toward the recovery of its own twelfth-century monastic-theology sources – Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Saint-Thierry, Aelred of Rievaulx, Guerric of Igny – and toward the renewal of lectio divina. The interreligious strand continued, but as a specialized institution (Monastic Interreligious Dialogue) rather than as the order’s main line.

The Centering Prayer branch (cross-reference)

Three of the OCSO’s own – William Meninger, M. Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating – developed the Centering Prayer method at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, in the early 1970s. Because that method became the most visible face of Catholic contemplative practice, it is documented in full in the parent dossier’s Topic 4, and the Eastern Orthodox critique of it there. The point to register here is that Centering Prayer is genealogically a Cistercian product – a Trappist adaptation of the Cloud of Unknowing – not a free-floating New Age technique, and its founders framed it as executing exactly the Perfectae Caritatis return-to-sources mandate for their order.

Andre Louf (1929-2010)

Andre Louf, OCSO, is the theologically weightiest post-Merton Cistercian writer on the European side. Born in Leuven in 1929, he entered the Trappist abbey of Mont-des-Cats (northern France) in 1947 and was elected its abbot in 1963, serving thirty-four years until his retirement in 1997, after which he lived as a hermit and chaplain in southern France; he died on 12 July 2010 (Wikipedia: Andre Louf; Communio: “Fr Andre Louf, OCSO RIP”). He was general editor of the scholarly Collectanea Cisterciensia and, at John Paul II’s invitation, wrote the meditations for the 2004 papal Way of the Cross at the Colosseum.

His first book, Heer, leer ons bidden (Lannoo, 1971), translated into more than ten languages and into English as Teach Us to Pray (1974), is the compact statement of his theology of prayer as grace received rather than effort exerted. The Cistercian Way (Cistercian Publications, 1983) is his exposition of the order’s specific contemplative charism. His later corpus – Grace Can Do More, Tuning in to Grace, The Way of Humility, In the School of Contemplation – develops a “theology of weakness”: that spiritual maturity consists in the acceptance of one’s own poverty and the reception of mercy, not in ascetical achievement (Liturgical Press / Cistercian Publications: The Way of the Heart (biography by Charles Wright)). Louf is the clearest post-Merton case of the monastic-theology recovery in a living contemplative register.

Michael Casey (b. 1942)

Michael Casey, OCSO, is the most widely read living Cistercian monastic writer in English. A monk of Tarrawarra Abbey in Victoria, Australia, since 1960, he took a Scripture degree at Leuven and a doctorate from the Melbourne College of Divinity for a study of the desire for God in Bernard of Clairvaux (Liturgical Press author page). His Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina (Liguori/Triumph, 1996) is the standard contemporary practical-and-historical guide to lectio divina, placing the practice at the center of the Benedictine-Cistercian tradition (Internet Archive; America Magazine: “Learning lectio from a master”). His broader corpus – Toward God: The Ancient Wisdom of Western Prayer, A Guide to Living in the Truth, An Unexciting Life: Reflections on Benedictine Spirituality, Strangers to the City – is the principal contemporary Cistercian contribution to the outward-teaching of monastic spirituality. Casey is the lectio-divina recovery’s chief popularizer, the exact counterpart in the Cistercian world to Iain Matthew in the Carmelite: a vowed contemplative with a research doctorate writing simultaneously for monks and for lay readers.

The scholarly apparatus and the desert-source recovery

The order’s scholarly engine is Cistercian Publications (founded 1968, now under Liturgical Press at Collegeville) and its journal Cistercian Studies Quarterly, together with the annual medieval-Cistercian conference at Kalamazoo. Cistercian Publications’ translation series made the twelfth-century Cistercian Fathers and the earlier desert and Greek ascetic literature available in English – the primary-source substrate on which Louf, Casey, and the order’s self-renewal depend. Additional order writers in the same recovery include Charles Cummings, OCSO (Monastic Practices), and, in the Trappist-Gethsemani line specifically, Matthew Kelty and the community Merton left behind.

The Trappistine and women’s-contemplative strand

The post-Merton Cistercian recovery has a women’s branch that is chronically under-documented relative to the male houses. The Trappistines (OCSO nuns) produced their own contemplative writers – among them Gail Fitzpatrick, former abbess of Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Iowa, whose Seasons of Grace is a collection of monastic meditations – and the Redwoods Monastery in California became, under abbess Myriam Dardenne, one of the more contemplatively experimental Trappistine houses and a node in the same Buddhist-Christian dialogue that produced the Gethsemani Encounters (Carl McColman, “Beyond Merton: Exploring the Riches of Cistercian Literature,” Patheos). The recovery of the desert ammas (mothers) alongside the abbas, and of the women’s twelfth-century Cistercian and Beguine mystics (Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch – the latter documented in McGinn’s Flowering of Mysticism), is part of the same source-return. This strand is real but its published record is thinner and its scholarly apparatus less developed than the male-monastic side – itself one of the dossier’s thin spots (Section 8).

Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and the Gethsemani Encounters

Merton’s interreligious turn was institutionalized, not abandoned. Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) – known internationally as DIMMID, the Commissions established under the Benedictine Confederation – has since 1977 organized exchanges between North American Christian monastics (principally Benedictine and Cistercian) and non-Christian monastics, chiefly Buddhist and Hindu, focused on shared practice rather than comparative dogma (Everyday Zen: “The Second Gethsemani Encounter”).

The flagship events are the Gethsemani Encounters, held at Merton’s own Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. The first, in July 1996, gathered roughly twenty-five Christian and twenty-five Buddhist monastics – including Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan participants – at the Dalai Lama’s urging and in explicit memory of his 1968 meeting with Merton; the proceedings were published as The Gethsemani Encounter: A Dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics, edited by Donald W. Mitchell and James Wiseman, OSB (Continuum, 1997) (Amazon listing; Tricycle: “The Second Gethsemani Encounter”). Encounters followed in 2002, 2008, and 2015. MID/DIMMID is the direct institutional continuation of Merton’s dialogue impulse – and, like the Camaldolese ashram line and the WCCM, the strand of the post-conciliar contemplative revival most directly in view of the Orationis Formas caution.

5. Cross-cutting institutions and scholarly anchors

The revival is carried by a small number of shared institutions and a maturing academic field.

Shared publishing infrastructure. Liturgical Press (Collegeville) and its imprint Cistercian Publications are the Benedictine-Cistercian engine; ICS Publications (Washington) is the Carmelite engine; Paulist Press’s Classics of Western Spirituality series is the shared critical-translation series across all traditions (documented in the parent dossier). Fortress Press and Crossroad carry the academic-lay constructive works (Ahlgren, McGinn).

The discipline of Christian spirituality. The field matured institutionally through the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (the SSCS, affiliated with the American Academy of Religion) and the Nijmegen-anchored journal Studies in Spirituality; Waaijman’s Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods is its methodological charter. The scholarly anchors already established in the parent dossier apply here directly:

  • Bernard McGinn (Chicago, emeritus). The forthcoming eighth and final volume of The Presence of God, The Innovation of Mysticism: Modern Catholic Thought from the Late Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, will be the standard historical placement of exactly the material in this dossier when it appears.
  • Mary Frohlich (Catholic Theological Union). The principal contemporary Carmelite mystical-theology specialist and the natural bridge scholar to this dossier’s Carmelite section.
  • Kees Waaijman (Radboud / Titus Brandsma, emeritus). The methodologist of the field.
  • Sandra Schneiders (Jesuit School of Theology, emerita) and Philip Sheldrake (Cambridge / Oblate) are the two other principal theorists of “spirituality” as an academic discipline, both of whom should be on the esoteric-scholar roster for the contemporary Christian material alongside McGinn, Louth, Turner, and McIntosh.

6. Position – what the evidence supports

These are decades-old, well-documented developments, and the evidence supports a definite reading.

First: the revival is real, and it is larger and older than Centering Prayer. The Centering-Prayer-and-CAC visibility that dominates the parent dossier’s contemporary section is a genuine phenomenon but a partial one. The scholarly-monastic core – ICS, the Teresianum, the Titus Brandsma Institute, Cistercian Publications, Liturgical Press, and the cohort of specialist-practitioners (Matthew, Casey, Louf, FitzGerald, Waaijman) – carries the actual apophatic inheritance and predates the Centering Prayer method. Any account that treats the contemporary Catholic contemplative revival as essentially the Keating-Rohr movement is mistaking the most-marketed wing for the whole.

Second: the driver is genuinely conciliar. The return-to-sources structure is not a retrospective gloss. Each order re-read its own primary literature under the Perfectae Caritatis mandate, and the outward-teaching impulse rests on Lumen Gentium’s universal call to holiness. The revival is best understood as the contemplative-orders’ execution of the council’s ressourcement program, with Leclercq’s monastic-theology recovery as the shared intellectual charter.

Third: the revival splits cleanly into three functional wings, and the splits matter. (a) A scholarly-recovery wing (Matthew, Casey, Louf, FitzGerald, Waaijman, Ahlgren) that stays anchored in the doctors and the sources; this wing carries the apophatic content intact. (b) A lay-catechetical wing (Chittister’s Monasteries of the Heart; the Centering Prayer network; the WCCM) that extends practice outward to non-vowed practitioners and, in the process, necessarily simplifies the doctrine – the recurring criticism, from both Orthodox and traditional-Catholic quarters, that popularization thins the tradition is not baseless, though it is also not the whole story. (c) An interfaith-contemplative wing (the Camaldolese/Griffiths/Abhishiktananda line; Merton’s continuation through MID and the Gethsemani Encounters) that is the boldest and the most magisterially scrutinized, sitting precisely on the frontier Orationis Formas was written to mark.

Fourth: the apophatic access-control thesis from the parent dossier holds. The revival’s texts are all published and its practices all describable, but the operative core remains reserved-by-direction, not reserved-by-oath. FitzGerald’s “impasse,” Louf’s “theology of weakness,” Matthew’s “impact of God,” and Casey’s lectio are all published in full; none of them transfers its operative content propositionally. The revival confirms rather than complicates the parent dossier’s central finding: the Christian contemplative tradition implements the encoded-teaching pattern through textual self-limitation and the seal of direction, and the post-conciliar outward-teaching movement has not changed that – it has only made the published layer far larger while leaving the directed layer exactly where it was.

Thin spots. The reception history is uneven. The precise degree to which the lay-catechetical wing “thins” the doctrine is asserted on both sides and measured by neither; it is an evaluative dispute, not a settled finding. The internal magisterial file on the interfaith wing – what, if anything, was communicated privately to the Camaldolese, the WCCM, or the American women’s institutes beyond the public Orationis Formas and the 2009-2015 LCWR assessment – is not in the open record. And McGinn’s synthesizing eighth volume, which will be the standard historical judgment on this entire period, is not yet published, so the field’s own consolidated verdict is still pending.

7. Cross-reference index

  • Parent dossier (this one is its explicit extension): Christian Apophatic Theology and Hesychast Practice: The Living Continuity – covers Dionysius forward, Hesychasm, the Carmelite doctors, Merton, and the Centering Prayer / CAC movement with its Orthodox critique. This dossier picks up its Topics 3 and 4 and develops the scholarly-monastic core.
  • Encoded-teaching pattern: Comparative Mystery Schools – the eight-tradition frame into which the Christian apophatic case is slotted.
  • Operative-orders living-lineage map: Modern Operative Orders – the Carmelite, Benedictine, and Cistercian revival lineages documented here are the Christian-monastic equivalent of the operative-order category.
  • Landscape thin-spot map: Esoteric Landscape Map – the Christian-contemplative thin spot the parent dossier began closing; this dossier closes the contemporary-monastic remainder.
  • Scholar roster: Esoteric Scholar Roster – add Mary Frohlich, Kees Waaijman, Sandra Schneiders, and Philip Sheldrake as the contemporary-Christian-spirituality anchors alongside McGinn, Louth, Turner, and McIntosh.

8. What still cannot be covered

  1. The directed interior. As in every tradition in this corpus, the operative core of Carmelite, Benedictine, and Cistercian formation is the spiritual-direction relationship, and its content is sealed by the same norms that govern sacramental confession. What a Carmelite novice-mistress teaches, what an abbot says to a monk in the chapter of faults, what passes between director and directee in any of these communities – none of it is in the books and none of it will be.

  2. The magisterial back-channel. The public disciplinary record – Orationis Formas (1989), the New Age reflection (2003), the LCWR doctrinal assessment (2009-2015) – is available. Whatever private communications passed between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) and the Camaldolese, the WCCM, the Erie Benedictines, or individual figures is not in the open record.

  3. The reception measurement. The central evaluative dispute – whether the lay-catechetical wing preserves or thins the apophatic doctrine – is argued vigorously and measured by no one. There is no study that operationalizes “fidelity to the tradition” across the Monasteries of the Heart membership, the Centering Prayer network, or the WCCM chapters. The claim and counter-claim are both, at present, assertions.

  4. The interfaith frontier’s doctrinal status. Whether the Christian-advaita experiment of Abhishiktananda and Griffiths, carried forward in the Camaldolese and in MID, is a legitimate development of Christian contemplation or a dissolution of the Creator-creature distinction is the live theological question the parent dossier’s “convergence problem” methodological note frames. It is genuinely unresolved in the academic and magisterial literature, and this dossier does not resolve it.

  5. The consolidated historical verdict. Bernard McGinn’s The Innovation of Mysticism (the eighth and final volume of The Presence of God) will be the standard scholarly placement of this whole period. Until it appears, the field’s own settled judgment on the post-conciliar revival does not exist in a single authoritative form; this dossier is a working assessment against that eventual standard.

Summary (250 words)

The post-Vatican-II Catholic apophatic and mystical revival is substantially larger and older than the Centering Prayer movement that dominates its public image. Driven by the Second Vatican Council’s Perfectae Caritatis (1965) mandate to return to founding sources and by Lumen Gentium’s universal call to holiness, and intellectually charted by Jean Leclercq’s recovery of “monastic theology,” the contemplative orders re-read their own primary literature and taught it outward to laypeople.

The Carmelite wing runs on the Institute of Carmelite Studies, the Teresianum, and the Titus Brandsma Institute, and on a cohort of specialist-practitioners: Iain Matthew (The Impact of God), Gillian Ahlgren (Enkindling Love), Constance FitzGerald (the “impasse” reframing of the dark night), and Kees Waaijman (the disciplinization of spirituality). The Benedictine wing splits between Joan Chittister’s reform-and-lay-extension movement (Monasteries of the Heart) and Cyprian Consiglio’s Camaldolese interfaith line, which carries the Christian-ashram lineage of Bede Griffiths and Abhishiktananda (Shantivanam, received into the Camaldolese in 1980) and the John Main / WCCM meditation network. The Cistercian post-Merton continuation turned less to Merton’s interreligious path than to the recovery of its twelfth-century sources – Andre Louf’s theology of weakness, Michael Casey’s lectio divina renewal, Cistercian Publications – while institutionalizing the dialogue impulse in Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and the Gethsemani Encounters (1996 onward).

The 1989 CDF letter Orationis Formas marks the standing magisterial boundary the interfaith wing runs against. The revival confirms the parent dossier’s thesis: the published layer has grown enormous; the operative interior remains reserved by direction.

Sources

Magisterial and Conciliar Documents

  • Second Vatican Council. Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life). 28 October 1965. vatican.va. (Wikipedia summary and vote count.)
  • Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), ch. 5, “The Universal Call to Holiness.” 21 November 1964. vatican.va.
  • Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Orationis Formas (Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation). 15 October 1989. vatican.va. (Wikipedia overview.)

Foundational Scholarship

Carmelite

Benedictine

Cistercian