The first Cistercians began a manner of living which has through the ages attracted, sustained and brought to a happy conclusion the lives of tens of thousands of monastic men and women. The Cistercian Patrimony is not a matter of lifeless stones, but a living reality incarnate in the lives and labors of innumerable brothers and sisters and expressed explicitly by a substantial body of doctrine developed by Cistercian authors of all centuries. We inherit from the past not only buildings and artifacts, not only a lifestyle that many romantically believe has changed little from the Middle Ages, but a tradition of life communicated in a thousand humble ways from one generation to the next. Beneath the Cistercian reality lays a network of beliefs, values and core practices that embody the energy of the charism. The heart of the Cistercian Patrimony is a philosophy of life as validly applied to the 21st century as to the 12th.
MICHAEL CASEY “Toward the Cistercian Millennium,”Tjurunga 54 (May 1998)
