Independence for Saint Anselm

Independence for St. Anselm

During the abbacy of Abbot Earnest the most important event affecting the future of the St. Mary’s Abbey community was surely the evolution of St. Anselm in New Hampshire into an independent abbey. This must have been long anticipated as it is the genius of Benedictine monasteries that the daughter communities separate from their mother houses and go their own way as soon as circumstances permit.
Personal communication was maintained between New Jersey and New Hampshire since all had studied and worked together in one or both houses. For example, Father Augustine Wirth II (Later, first headmaster of Delbarton School) built a wireless station in his physics lab on High Street and maintained regular communication with confreres in the north.  But as time went on, St. Anselm attracted numerous New England men whose vocations centered on Manchester and to whom Newark and New Jersey were foreign. Newarkers, in turn, looked to High Street as home.

At a meeting of the Chapter of St. Mary’s Abbey in Newark in May 1927, it was decided unanimously to petition the Holy See for the creation of an independent abbey in Manchester. Abbot Ernest allowed those who wished to transfer stability to remain in Manchester and some thirty monks elected to do so. Before the independence of St. Anslem St.

Mary’s Abbey numbered one-hundred five members and was now reduced to seventy-one, but over the next ten years, by the time of Abbot Ernest’s death in 1937, the membership of St. Mary’s Abbey had increased to eighty-five.  On 4 October 1927, in an election presided over by Abbot Ernest as President of the Congregation, the Capitulars of St. Anselm Abbey elected their first abbot, Bertrand Dolan, on the thirty-fifth ballot.