New Melleray Abbey pauses accepting new members as its community shrinks

As its community ages, New Melleray Abbey in Dubuque has decided that it will no longer accept new members, which includes candidates to become Trappist monks at the Abbey.

Sam Mulgrew, director of business at the monastery, said the Abbey’s Commission for the Future made the decision to stop accepting new members because of the “shrinking size of the community” in Dubuque and that the Abbey could no longer “support the proper formation of new candidates.”

Currently there are 10 Trappist monks living and working at the 177-year-old New Melleray Abbey and there is one monk who still is “in the novitiate,” Mulgrew said, meaning they are in the probationary stage of joining the monastery and have not yet taken solemn vows.

Mulgrew said the Abbey has not yet made a decision about whether the monastery in Peosta will be suppressed — which refers to the religious house of the monastery being dissolved — and if the Abbey will ultimately close.

The decision to suppress or close the Abbey is up to Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance’s — or the “Trappist Order” — general chapter, which meets every three years. It will meet next in August 2027.

“Until then it's business as usual, with the 10 monks here in the community focusing on their vocation to the best of their abilities,” Mulgrew said. “The community at New Melleray Abbey is in prayerful discernment about their future, and what that will look like.”

A continuing trend

The move by New Melleray Abbey mirrors nationwide trends, as monasteries have grappled with aging members and fewer vocations.

Last September, Mulgrew told The Gazette when he started working at the monastery in 1999, there were 33 monks living there. In September, that number was down to 12, and this month it stands at 10.

At its peak, Mulgrew said the monastery had about 150 monks.

Mulgrew said last year there were only five or six monks who were still able to do any type of manual labor. That includes gardening, tending to livestock and working in the Abbey’s 1,500-acre forested property growing sustainable wood for their casket making business, which Mulgrew oversees.

The monks contribute to the Abbey’s casket making business, Trappist Caskets, which produces wooden caskets made from sustainably grown pine, black cherry, walnut and red oak trees.

In recent years, the monastery also has worked to bolster conservation efforts around the Abbey by implementing dams along the property’s creeks. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Forest Service recently awarded the Abbey more than $3 million to protect its land indefinitely from development, through the Service’s Forest Legacy Program.

Brother Joseph, a Trappist Monk at the Abbey, said the issue of monks aging out of Abbey work, monasteries closing and fewer vocations is being seen around the world. He added that some monasteries can consolidate with others to keep their doors open.

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But Mulgrew said it can be “psychologically hard” for a monk to leave a monastery where they’ve lived for decades and start anew at a different one.

“If you become a monk and you have stability in that particular place, this sense of place is developed, and you're not attracted to leaving that place and going to another you know, decamping to another monastery,” Mulgrew said. “None of the monasteries really want to pick up and move and join another community.”

Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. She is also a contributing writer for the Ag and Water Desk, an independent journalism collaborative focusing on the Mississippi River Basin.

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Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com