The monk pointed his pistol. ‘As far as I am concerned, the community no longer exists. The land is mine. I suggest you get out— and quick!’ The two hired thugs made it clear the threat was a real one. Reluctantly, the little group of Benedictine postulants, and their superior, packed up their few things and trudged off into the heat and dust of a Mexican afternoon. So ended the first period of one of the most interesting experiments in the monastic life in this century.

The superior was, it turned out, a man of rare courage. Born in Lille in 1912, and educated ih Louvain, Dom Grégoire Lemercier spent seven years at the abbey of Mont-César before accepting the invitation of a Mexican colleague to accompany him and another monk, a Belgian, to found a monastery in Mexico. The project was delayed by the outbreak of war, during which Lemercier served as a chaplain and was taken prisoner. When he was released he left for the United States, and joined his two companions at their abbey of Monte Cassino in the north of Mexico in 1944. The foundation was a double failure: the Belgian threw up his vocation and got married, and the Mexican apostatized and at the end of 1949 took over the monastery by armed force. Two years later, little daunted by this experience, Dom Grégoire founded another monastery, Santa Maria de la Resurrección, a few miles from Cuernavaca, following the strict Benedictine observance.