Novice Put on "Performance Improvement Plan" for Chanting Divine Office in Classical Latin

The Novice Master Has Hope That Campbell is Reformable, But Has Concerns Over Monks From Certain Homeschool Backgrounds

Thanks to Sobrii Estote, an IIT source inside at St. Joseph’s Abbey for contributing to this report. Please get in touch with us securely here at sumchristianus@gmail.com via Morse code with whatever means you have at your disposal with any tips of your own.

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St. Joseph’s Abbey, Shopton, NY - 24-year-old novice Thomas Campbell was doing very well in his first year at the Benedictine Monastery of the Abbey of St. Joseph of Carlopa in rural upstate New York. As the third oldest in a homeschooling Catholic family of seven children, he was well-rounded and well-disciplined, making him an easy fit for the monastic horarium, quite useful and handy around the abbey’s farm, and feeling quite fulfilled already, even early on in his postulancy. Yes, his family had only been drawn to Catholic tradition when he was around 17, and he hadn’t had that much experience with Gregorian chant, but there wasn’t any fundamental incompatibility in him with the monastic life—or so novice master Brother Benedict Thomas Barclay thought.

Maybe they should have checked to see which homeschool program his mother used with him and his siblings, though, because the trouble started at month eleven when his postulancy ended, his novitiate began, and he started singing, as was the custom, fully out loud and clearly with the rest of the brothers.

At first, they thought it was his southern accent. He had been born and raised in and near the South. Maybe that was why he was pronouncing his “c”s a little oddly, Brother Barclay thought. But then the Easter season finished, and the Novice Master’s worst fears were confirmed when the monastery switched to singing the “Salve Regina”, as per the liturgical year at the end of Compline.

Yes, he was pronouncing “Regina” as “Reh-GEE-nah” instead of “Reh-JEE-nah”

This was bad, very bad, the Novice Master thought. Thomas Campbell had been trained in classical Latin. Clearly, they hadn’t used Seton Home Study School or this problem would have been nipped in the bud a decade earlier. Come to think of it, he soon realized, he had never asked which program he had grown up with. Could he perhaps have been a victim of the classicist indoctrination available as an ‘option’ at Mother of Divine Grace or Kolbe Academy? What else could the new novice have been exposed to? Had Thomas been taught via the grammar translation method? Would his apparent failure to work through Seton’s Catholic-centered math problems like “If Dominic prays 3 decades of the Rosary in the morning and 2 decades at night, how many Hail Marys did he say?” or “If a parish priest needs to buy beeswax candles for the altar...” cause troubles further down the line in the Abbey bookshop? And then there was that odd assortment of Confederate flags on Thomas’s brother’s truck when he had been dropped off last July.

There was clearly a lot that needed investigating, so the next day, Brother Barclay and Campbell had the meeting.

Campbell confessed pretty quickly. It wasn’t that hard of a meeting. He was, obviously, put on a Performance Improvement Plan, and Brother Barclay made it clear that this problem with his prior life as a Catholic wasn’t a deal breaker for his religious vocation, and that it was alright for Campbell to use classical Latin when working around the abbey, but that it was truly a modernist corruption to have any of it around the liturgy.

Ever since the meeting, which took place on Monday, Barclay has found Novice Campbell’s pronunciation to be notably better, but he did slip once in failing to aspirate the “H” in hodie in the Pater Noster at the end of None today. This mistake of Campbell, to his credit, was one he caught himself and did immediate penance for, even though the mistake wasn’t noticed by anyone else (other than its end, the monks pray the Pater Noster silently). Barclay is convinced that Campbell, as a whole, is reformable, though he is taking measures to ensure that the monastery performs stricter screening of all candidates lest this happen again.