In 1926, when I was in the fourth grade, the children of Belcher School in East Milton walked to the square to attend the dedication of a monument to commemorate the first railroad in America. Strictly speaking, it was not the first, but among them, and the best known, for it carried 30-ton granite blocks from the quarry in Quincy three miles to the Nepouset River, where barges carried the blocks to Charles Town for the Bunker Hill monument. This, to note the Battle of Bunker Hill 150 years before. The battle was lost to the British, but British losses were so great that they later abandoned Boston.

Down in Baltimore in the later era of the canals, business men were concerned that much former produce that once came over the mountains to the coast and cities like Baltimore was lost to the Erie Canal and the Hudson River and the port of New York. They proposed to do something about it and set out to build a railroad like the one they visited in Milton, this one across the mountains to the Ohio River and the nearest city, Wheeling, West Virginia. It took years to set this venture up and meanwhile the steam engine was invented in England and used on railroads. By 1852 the Irish workers had reached Wheeling for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, America’s first.

Then, a few years later, when Archbishop Spalding, a local son, head of the diocese of Baltimore, came for the 1866 dedication of Gethsemani’s church, he came by train. From Wheeling on to Cincinnati, where he no doubt paused in the rigors of travel with his brother Archbishop Purcell of Cincinnati, and then on to Louisville. There he met Bishop Lavalle, and then on by train on the Nashville line to Gethsemane station. Surely local leaders took their best carriages to meet the prelates and the many guests that came with them.

This was a great day. Not only was the wilderness graced by a sizeable Catholic population, with a former cathedral of splendid beauty, though the Bishop was now located in Louisville, but the Abbey of Gethsemani was dedicating a most handsome abbey church. This was worth noting.

If talk among the guests would have centered on the new abbey church it would also  have dealt with the wonder of modern travel. No doubt many details would have been shared of the journey through the mountains, the long trip along the Ohio, the stops made. And above all, the speed. We today might forget that the step was from horse, horse and buggy, to train. A going of a few miles-an-hour to amazing things like 40 and 50 miles-an-hour. The train was now the fastest thing in the universe. An achievement also worth noting. In fact the Civil War was the first in which the railroad played a significant role.

The prelates and the priests and the monks and the people must have felt very much alive, indeed rather excited about the achievements of the country. The war, thank God, was over and the rebuilding of America under way. And this church in the wilderness was a blessed sign that God was with us.

The monks followed tradition and followed the usual pattern of the basilica: the long nave, the apse. This takes us back to the early church of Rome. The fact that we are a minor basilica is true: it is a basilica and we do have ties with the earliest Roman church. But it is also America.

And so the design was very American and followed the popular pattern of having the roof lined with lath and plaster and creating arches and bays later painted to make the whole something of a Gothic church. This was done everywhere. It could be called “poor man’s Gothic” since few could afford stone churches, let alone stone arches and bays, like the statues made of plaster: one did what one could with what one had. And the general effect was pleasing. And the manner is still popular.

But there is inherent in the Cistercian inheritance a sort of inbuilt trend toward the authentic. The real. This goes back to Citeaux when the young monks were captivated by the possibility of being monks in as authentic a way as possible: some way of shedding accretions and reaching the original that had been characteristic of the Cistercian.

Thus, it was to be taken for granted that sooner or later the lath and the plaster would come down and we would give up trying to look like something we were not and become what we really are. And so in time the original church emerged, and we are so taken by those who erected so superb a structure. We pardon them for trying to be more American than there was need to be. We can understand that. Every people coming here—and we have all come from somewhere else—has tried to adapt and fit and be localized, even if much of that was not necessary. In the end we become better Americans through loyalty to our best traditions.

And so today we rejoice in a handsome church our forefathers created in far-off Kentucky. Nor is the lesson lost on us. Our efforts to adjust, to adapt, to be part of our time and an aspect of our culture, must nonetheless remain authentic to what we are and profess to be. This is a never-done project. A continuing project. Yes, we have cars and trucks and all-terrain vehicles, we have coolers and air conditioning, we have heat and computers and web pages. We ship UPS and Parcel Post. We fly to Rome and anywhere else. We have top medical care. But the core, the heart, the point is there, and we mean to keep it there. We still get up in the night to chant and do so seven times a day. We still have an abbot and a Rule and obey both. We wear the same habit our fathers wore and make the same vows and try to keep them. Any of the past could join us and with a bit of adjustment feel at home.

Those archbishops coming by train surely made the papers. And they themselves were quite excited by it. For all that, we too are quite excited to be alive, to be here, to be monks, in this church, this year 2003.  Amen.