World figures such as the Dali Llama have visited its serene grounds, yet for many local people Holy Wisdom Monastery remains shrouded in mystery.
 
As a community, the Sisters at Holy Wisdom – formerly the Roman Catholic Monastery of St. Benedict Center – spent the last 50 years engaging in a dialogue with other faiths and providing a retreat for those in need of spiritual renewal. In the last decade, they also restored their grounds from farmland back to native prairie.

In 1958, a 19-year-old girl named Mary David Walgenbach arrived at the monastery.
Now the community’s prioress, she helped it grow from a traditional Catholic school for girls into a haven for members of diverse religious communities. At the same time, the Sisters at Holy Wisdom have maintained their devotion to the teachings of St. Benedict – something that in some ways ultimately cost them their formal link with the Roman Catholic Church.

“We are the Benedictine Women of Madison, an ecumenical community founded as Roman Catholic,” Walgenbach explained. “We were Roman Catholic, but for the past 40 years, we have been doing ecumenical work, and what we focus on is really ecumenical hospitality.”

Ecumenism, a term referring to a movement for more unity within different branches of the Christian faith, is something the monastery strove for long before splitting from its Catholic roots.

“We had a retreat and conference center where people of different religious backgrounds and denominations would come,” Walgenbach said. “Different groups would use our facilities, but we would always invite them to pray with us. We pray the Liturgy of the Hours, which is psalms and scripture readings, and hymn singing. And we always prayed with other people. For instance, we had the Summer Institute for Mission, which was sponsored by the Lutheran Church, visit for 17 summers.”

“They would come here for five weeks – young people with children who were going off to Madagascar or Liberia, college students going to teach English as a second language, retired people who were going off somewhere – sponsored by the Lutheran Church,” she continued. “We got to know all these people. We heard their stories of faith, we played games with them, we sang and we prayed. All of those experiences are what shaped our ecumenical heart.”

While interfaith dialogue has been pursued by many in the Catholic tradition, not everyone in the church was pleased with the decision to run such an open monastic community, especially when the women running it started pushing the boundaries of established Catholic law.

“Eventually came the question of a protestant woman who said she wanted to be a sister here,” Walgenbach recalled. “We had to say to her, ‘This is a Roman Catholic group and cannon law doesn’t allow that to happen.’”

But the query started the community on a path away from its formal roots, and the Sisters of St. Benedict were soon wondering if they could leave the Catholic Church while maintaining their religious community and monastic lifestyle.

They soon found a solution.

“We belong to an independent federation of 16 other monasteries of women and we petitioned them and worked through their process,” Walgenbach said. “So now, we are no longer a Roman Catholic community, we are an ecumenical community. We have our first protestant member [the woman mentioned above], who is an ordained protestant minister, and she has been here with us for eight years.”

It took nearly a decade, but in 2006 the monastery officially became an ecumenical community, though Walgenbach and most of the Sisters remain independently Catholic women. The change gave the community a renewed sense of freedom.

“It’s Roman Catholics, it’s Presbyterians, it’s Lutherans – it could be anybody,” Walgenbach said of people who come to Holy Wisdom Monastery. “We are no longer governed by canon law, which said you have to be Catholic to make confession, hold the office of prioress and all that…It’s probably the first ecumenical Benedictine monastery in North America.”

What the Sisters at Holy Wisdom focus on most in the year 2007 is spiritual retreats.

They hold a Sunday assembly - an ecumenical worship service at nine a.m. They also run an oblate (followers of St. Benedict) program attended by 160 people.

“They come here six times a year and learn the spirituality of St. Benedict, which is in essence a spirituality of who God is; who I am; and how do I try to find a balance in my life relating to God and my family,” Walgenbach said.

“And people come here just to walk the grounds,” she continued. “Like right now we have somebody here from LaCrosse and somebody here from Chicago. They can take a room; they can eat with us if they choose. They come to rest.”

Along with four nature trails and a wooded hermitage for people seeking solitude, the Sisters also work to raise money for The African School Project – building schools for impoverished children in Nairobi.

Prairie Restoration
Many people that come for a retreat look to nature as a way to find God, said Walgenbach. For that reason, the Sisters are meticulous tenants of the land.

“The prairie that we have restored from farmland is the place where Creation speaks to the hearts of all of us. That is especially important for people,” Walgenbach said.

Starting in 1995, they began converting 10 acres of farmland back to prairie annually.

“Every year we would add another ten acres, gathering seeds from other parks or anyone who had seeds,” Walgenbach said. “We would prepare the soil and volunteers would come help us. Gradually we returned the land to its natural state.”

Those 130 acres serve as more than just scenic trails, she explained.

“It is very important because over 200 acres drain through our property and the prairie acts like a filter for the water before it goes into Lake Mendota,” Walgenbach said. “In that way we think we are doing our part ecologically.”

Breaking with the Catholic Church
The process of leaving the Roman Catholic Church to become an ecumenical community was at times an arduous one – and many at Holy Wisdom Monastery still consider themselves Catholic.

While the Madison Diocese offered an open ear after the split, it ultimately offered little else.

“Bishop Morlino said any time we wanted to talk with him, that would be fine,” Walgenbach said. “But he also said it’s not possible to have the Roman Catholic Eucharist out here anymore, or to have the sacrament or to have young children out here because he thinks it’s to confusing to them that we are ecumenical and not a Roman Catholic community.”

When asked if it was worth it, Walgenbach unflinchingly answers, “100 percent.”

St. Benedict’s Origins
The original monastery was built in 1954 when four Sisters traveled to Madison from Iowa.

Walgenbach tells of the community’s origins:

“The Bishop of the Diocese was Bishop William O’Connor, and he invited them to build a school for young girls. So the Sisters found this property. Back then, Highway M was a dirt road and Madison was relatively small compared to what it is now. The Sisters bought 40 acres and built this building and started doing retreat work. Then, in 1958, they started to build a second building on top of the hill next door and began a school for girls.”

It was then that Walgenbach arrived. When the Second Vatican Council, held in the first half of the 1960s, directed monastic communities to return to the basic teachings of their founders, in this case St. Benedict, the Sisters in Middleton followed suit, but interfaith meetings never ceased. In fact, members of the monastery used his theology as a way to support their openness to other faiths.

“Back then we had the Monks of Taizé, which is a protestant community of monastic men in Taizé France, come out on weekends and bring University Students here,” Walgenbach said. “We also had interfaith dialogue when groups of Catholics and Protestants would get together.”

Holy Wisdom Monastery may have a new name 50 years later, but its philosophy has changed very little.

An invitation in one of the monastery’s brochures today reads:

Following Benedict’s directive, we recognize the face of Christ in each person. In response, we offer welcoming and respectful space where all people regardless of class, background, race, sexual orientation and religious affiliation can come and renew their relationship with God, themselves and others.