The Episcopal News Service reports that the Order of the Holy Cross will sell the Santa Barbara property where the Mount Calvary Retreat House and Monastery was located and which was destroyed in a 2008 brush fire.
“We met at our annual meeting of the entire order in New York in the middle of June and discussed all of this extensively,” Radelmiller said in a July 14 telephone call from St. Mary’s Retreat House. The brothers have resided there since a 2008 fire destroyed the 20,000 square-foot Spanish colonial-style Benedictine monastery complex.
Attempting to rebuild the monastery, established in 1947 and located on a ridge above Santa Barbara with a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean, at today’s costs was prohibitive, he added. At the time of the fire, Radelmiller estimated the loss of buildings and property in the millions of dollars.
“We met at our annual meeting of the entire order in New York in the middle of June and discussed all of this extensively,” Radelmiller said in a July 14 telephone call from St. Mary’s Retreat House. The brothers have resided there since a 2008 fire destroyed the 20,000 square-foot Spanish colonial-style Benedictine monastery complex.
Attempting to rebuild the monastery, established in 1947 and located on a ridge above Santa Barbara with a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean, at today’s costs was prohibitive, he added. At the time of the fire, Radelmiller estimated the loss of buildings and property in the millions of dollars.
The decision to sell the property was unanimous. Plans are in the works to engage a local realtor to put the 15 “mostly vertical” acres and two building lots on the market, he said.
Also influencing the decision was the order’s static growth. “We are not sure that we’re going to have enough people in the order in ten years to manage a house here,” he said. While new people are joining the order, it is “not quite at the rate we would hope,” he said. “We’re not dying, but we’re not growing.”
Five monks continue the Benedictine order’s ministry of hospitality at the St. Mary’s Retreat House, said Radelmiller. There are about 40 brothers in the entire order, founded in 1884, in four houses in the United States, Canada, and South Africa.
Radelmiller said the order has spent “quite a lot of time thinking about what to do. It’s not easy,” he added. “Everyone, including ourselves, has got a lot of emotional history with the property and it’s very hard to let it go. But it seems really to me the only thing we can do.”