| About us |
| What
will you find if you come to visit us? A beautiful monastery complex, all of it built in the neo-gothic style, from the late 19th Century with a garden and stables in the built-up residential area of the Kölner Südstadt (southern part of Cologne). Yes, there's that too, but that is not all. |
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What
will you find? An independent group of women in the Catholic Church that is rooted in the monastic tradition of St. Benedict of Nursia. Yes, you can find that. Monks and nuns have been living according to the Benedictine tradition with its various branches for more than 1500 years in every imaginable culture and surroundings. Our Benedictine way of life is characterised by and is part of a direction that arose in France in the 17th Century during the heyday of French mysticism and that is lived today in 46 monasteries in 6 European countries. |
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| What
else will you find? An extended family with several generations in one house. Yes, that is always exciting. Our monastic family today is made up of 25 nuns aged between 32 and 93. - There is also a group of oblate members of our order, men and women who do not live in the monastery but who have committed themselves to the spiritual way of the community. - But there is also more to it all. . |
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You might also find that the monastery is an economic enterprise, with three craft businesses, in which we earn what we require to finance our needs: the bakery for making communion hosts, the workshop for ecclesiastical vestments and the workshop for textile restoration. These businesses are important, but they are not the reason for a monastery and for life in the order. There is far more to it than that. | ||
| You might find in the monastery a committed attempt to live an alternative kind of life in our world and our society in which the holistic aspect of human life is also very important. All well and good, that is no doubt true, but that is not what it is all about. | 
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It is not all about the lectures that the nuns give either, nor the articles in magazines and books or their work in church bodies and structures. There is something else, something quite different. |
| The international links with other self-supporting Benedictine communities especially in the Netherlands, in France, Italy and Brazil, which have grown in recent years, are also important and enriching, but they are not the central aspect in this monastery. |  |
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Many people come here and find that the monastery is a place of peace and quiet, a refuge for individual retreats or days of reflection or a place of catechesis, like many of the groups of First Communion children, school children or women who visit us. But that is not the centre of our existence either. | ||
The social support that we offer, sharing what we have in terms of relationships and food and whatever is needed with the poor people in our part of town and our brothers and sisters who live on the streets and ring at the door of our monastery every day is not the central aspect either. |
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In our monastery with its various facets what our lives are ultimately all about is prayer, prayer in which human beings seek divinity, the one divine being, meeting him and answering him, a lifetime long. Seeking God with your whole life and serving God with your whole life, those are the key words which describe life in our monastery. They stamp the personal path of each individual and the life of the community, giving each day its rhythm. Five times a day we meet in the monastery church to pray together and each day we celebrate the Eucharist. We are always singing the thousand-year-old psalms from the Bible, reading texts from the Old and the New Testament, letting the Gospel of Christ lead us. |
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To the best
of our ability we lead our lives according to this Gospel, truly, fundamentally
and practically, and we also include life in all its facets in our prayer
and bear it in seeking, unwavering trust in God and passionate patience.
We continue to sing every day the old biblical words of healing, sing
them out to our city in which we wish to live as nuns. And all our singing
and life as nuns is just the answer, the answer to the love and the call
that each of us has received from God. Without this experience - however
it came about - none of us would be here. |
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