The special vocation of the White Canons

The Return of the White Canons: The Modern Norbertines in Britain

by Aidan Nichols (Gracewing,  £12.99 /  €14.99)

Aidan Nichols is a Dominican friar, with a special interest in ecumenism, who has an established reputation as a writer on Catholic theology and culture.  His latest book concerns the revival of the White Canons, the Canons Regular of Prémonstré or Norbertines, in England during the Victorian “second spring”.

The order, founded in 1120, had been one of the most important orders in medieval times, but times change, and Victorian England was a very different place for the Catholic Church.

Their medieval order’s success has been described by two historians:  H. M. Colgin in 1950 and by Joseph A. Gribbin in 2012. The Norbertines were one of the principal monastic in institutions in the country, with offshoots elsewhere. Those were their days of glory.

The focus of  this new book is to describe the  “valiant efforts” to restore the order in Britain in modern times, with some success.  Here in Ireland, as Nichols has to admit, the order had a more shadowed reputation.

They had come to Ireland in 1924, establishing  themselves at the Abbey of the Holy Trinity in Co. Cavan. This did not end in glory at all. Nichols writes that in the closing decade of the twentieth century the reputation of Kilnacott was destroyed by the activities of  the serial abuser Brendan Smyth.  This brought down a government in the Republic and tainted the standing of two Archbishops of Armagh.

Nichols says that though this was “a disaster for the fortunes of Prémonstré  in Ireland, both north and south, the shadow of ill repute did not thankfully, extend beyond the Irish sea.”

That is not exact. There was evidence that Smyth had offended in Rhode Island, North Dakota, Boston, Wales and Italy. The offences in Providence, Rhode Island, were the subject of  a later investigation and diocesan report.

This was certainly a dark shadow over the order whose long history are described in these pages. The crimes of a single man and the errors of a few administrators meant that all the good work done by the order in England since its return in 1872 had been affected. This is sad: the good they did and do over the centuries still needs to be celebrated.

Certainly they flourish elsewhere. Today the order, with about 1300 members,  exists around the world, though it has faded in Britain, the British province  has offshoots  active elsewhere, not just in America,  but perhaps more importantly in troubled India.

The White Canons work in many parishes helping to sustain the essential substructure of the Church.  What they have done and continue to do on a global basis should be remembered and kept in mind rather the shadowed last days at Kilnacott.