Saint Sixtus Abbey through the years
The origins of our abbey have their roots in the thirteenth century.
Between 1260 and 1355 the religious community “Sisters of the house of Saint Sixtus” settled in our neighbourhood, and from 1615 a community of monks of the Bridgettine order lived here.
Until, in 1784, Emperor Joseph II of Austria put an end to the contemplative orders in our region, then the Austrian Netherlands.
Some years passed. In the winter of 1814 Jan-Baptist Victoor of Poperinge decided, in agreement with his wife, the widow of J.F. Lebbe, to take up a hermitage in the surrounding woods. This was a stone’s throw from the place that had once been a religious site, and where he would lead the life of a hermit to the end of his days.
When, in the summer of 1831, the prior of the newly founded monastery of the Katsberg settled on this spot together with a few monks, that was the beginning of our Trappist monastery.
The community’s early years, between 1831 and 1836, were difficult. Even so it grew steadily. In 1835 it numbered twenty-three members, and fifty-two in 1875. Twice the community even gave up a number of brothers. In 1850 sixteen monks left for Scourmont to found a daughter house, and around 1860 some twenty were sent to Canada to breathe new life into an ailing monastery at Tracadie, today’s Spencer in the United States.
Important events in this period are the building of the abbey church around 1848, the opening of the first brewery in 1839, the founding of a primary school in 1840, the gift of the monastery grounds by the Lebbe family in 1860, the raising of the priory to an abbey in 1871, and the development of the farm into a model holding between 1875 and 1878.
During the First World War the abbey was a refuge for tens of thousands of refugees and soldiers.
During the Second World War the abbey had a hard time economically, politically and organisationally. Human suffering that we can hardly gauge today.
That changed in the post-war period through important decisions whose fruits we still enjoy today.
Thus in 1945 Dom Gerardus Deleye, abbot from 1941 to 1968, decided to curb considerably the growing scale of the brewery. With an annual production of 8000 hectolitres it is still a small-scale business today.
And in 1963 he completed the building of the guesthouse. With, for that time, the ambition of a sound infrastructure. It illustrates the importance our community attaches to hospitality.
The other fundamental pole of our Cistercian life, “separation”, took shape in 1968 with the building of the present, enclosed abbey church. A timeless, modern building by Arthur Degeyter that carries on the centuries-old tradition of a sober Cistercian architecture.
The unstable state of the residential buildings obliged the monks to build anew.
Between 2008 and 2011 the enclosure was demolished to make way for a contemporary design by b0b Van Reeth. The first abbey church was given a new purpose as library and refectory. Together with the present abbey church, which is preserved, it adjoins the cloister square, which also houses the chapter house, scriptorium, novitiate, community room and infirmary. The first floor holds the brothers’ cells, while workrooms are installed in the cellars. The guesthouse too was adapted and rebuilt.
The past shows the heart of our deepest faith, and we trust that the future will confirm it: we are in God’s hand.
Click here for information about the Abbey’s contemporary architecture