Stephen De Kerdrel, a hermit monk who was recently excommunicated by the Catholic Church, didn’t like Pope Francis right off the bat.
While watching the pontiff on TV as he emerged for the first time in 2013 before faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square, De Kerdrel took a good look at the pope’s clothes — simple and unadorned — and knew, he said, that something was “terribly, terribly wrong.”
Francis’ decision not to wear the mozzetta, the red velvet and fur lined cape reserved for popes, was for De Kerdrel the initial indication that this pontificate was going to break with tradition. As the Argentine pope’s pontificate progressed, it became clear to De Kerdrel that the Catholic Church was opening its doors to the world in an unprecedented way.
But from the remote Orkney island of Westray in the far north of Scotland where he lives, De Kerdrel and his two companions — fellow monk Damon Kelly and Sister Colette Roberts — were not seeking to build bridges with the world.
Instead, the trio was trying to escape from it.
Day after day, that world evolved further away from their beliefs, casting the three out to places that (despite their isolation), in today’s interconnected reality filtered through sectarian news outlets, were never remote enough.
Just before Christmas, the three hermits were excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church for denouncing Pope Francis and most of the Roman Catholic Church’s hierarchy as being in league with Satan.
“We have broken from a false pope, a false magisterium, at the moment, and a false Curia and false bishops and cardinals,” De Kerdrel told Religion News Service in a mid-January phone interview.
“We’ve broken with them; we’ve not broken with the church. The church is there, but it’s under all this mess,” he said.
A variety of cats live with the monks on the island of Westray in Scotland. Courtesy photo
Excommunication is the latest step in a long journey by the three companions who, for years, have tried to cut themselves off from the sins of the world, as they see it, so they can live closer to God.
It’s a journey that took them from the Midlands of England to the remote islands of Scotland. They have been living there as hermits since 2016, with a handful of cats, in a pair of run-down homes with no running water. They have just enough electricity from solar power to run their blog and help them manage during the half of the year when sunlight is scarce.
The journey began 21 years ago this April, when both Kelly, now 58, and De Kerdrel, now 67, left the Capuchins, a Catholic religious order, to become hermits. While it’s hard to believe today that some still choose a hermetic lifestyle, the practice continues to exist in the Catholic tradition, as well as in many other religions.
Traditionally desert-dwellers who trace their origins to the prophet Elijah, Christian hermits choose to seclude themselves from the comforts and distractions of interacting with fellow humans to devote their lives to prayer, and sometimes penance, in order to support the world with their intentions.
Throughout history, hermits have enriched the Catholic tradition with some of its holiest and most intellectual minds, including St. Jerome and St. Basil, whose contributions to Catholic thinking and theology have led them to be considered “doctors of the church.”
Though beards, fasting and vows of silence are still a mark of hermits today, not everyone leading a hermetic life is isolated from the world. Mario Aguilar, a Benedictine hermit originally from Chile who also lives in Scotland, is a professor of divinity at the University of St. Andrews and is an active Twitter user.
“You have to look at the complexity of the different kinds of contemplative lives,” he told RNS in a phone interview (Feb. 7), adding that there are as many types of hermits as there are priests and lay people. Today, he added, a growing number of lay people have been attracted to this lifestyle, including himself.
“In secular terms, the hermit is somebody spending more time in solitude rather than in a community for the purpose of finding God,” he said.
Aguilar’s book, “The Way of the Hermit,” details his life as an eremite and activist, sleeping on the floor, providing his own food, occasionally listening to the BBC or praying for the victims of the coronavirus. He invites Buddhist and Hindu hermits to retreats and wrote a biography of Pope Francis, whose work he follows with passion.
“The eremitic vocation is to see God, but not in a selfish manner,” he said, adding that “you have to be a terrible hermit to start worrying and start blogging.”
But the three hermits in Orkney, according to Aguilar, may have been disenchanted with the world already, choosing to initiate a “Catholic revival” not unlike the Celtic monks who arrived on the island as early as the 4th century.
“It has been an odyssey like no other,” De Kerdrel said.
For years, the hermits moved from one island to another, never being able to find a place where they were welcome or didn’t get into trouble.
At first, the hermits were set up in a hut in the Galloway Hills in Scotland with a small wooden chapel and a garden. They were then separated, with De Kerdrel going to the jagged coasts of the Isle of Mull and Kelly to administer to youth not too far away.
Once reunited, Kelly and De Kerdrel were joined by Roberts, now 64, in 2004 after she left behind her job as a consultant surgeon in the U.K. Before that she had been taking care of her chronically ill mother, who died in 2002.
De Kerdrel described her as “an anchorite nun,” referring to the women who would traditionally live in small homes attached to the church and care for its needs.
The hermits’ real troubles began after the July 2013 passage of a bill by the British Parliament legalizing same-sex marriages, which are considered “intrinsically disordered” unions by the Roman Catholic Church. That decision prompted Kelly to aggressively protest against homosexuality — including passing out leaflets that police have described as “homophobic” and telling a lesbian couple that the Catholic Church “used to burn people like you,” according to news reports.
Eventually Kelly was arrested 13 times, convicted five times and spent about 148 hours in prison cells, said De Kerdrel. Kelly’s public distaste and aggressiveness toward same-sex couples led the bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, in England, to ask the hermits to leave.
Source: Religion News Service
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