Looking down Cory’s Lane

Continuing our glimpse back at previous monastic publications, we find in the monastery’s Newsletter of 1993 that editor Fr. Damian Kearney provided a brief historical note on the foundation of the monastery. We reprint his article, which offers interesting details on the life of Dom Leonard Sargent and others. We also include some notes Dom Damian provided which give us a glimpse into some monastic happenings from thirty years ago.

In November of this year [1993] Portsmouth marks the 75th anniversary of the first Mass said by its founder, Dom Leonard Sargent, in the original building of the monastery, the Manor House. In 1918, as the great war was coming to an end, Dom Leonard was serving as chaplain to the Newman Academy, an excellent Catholic boarding school in New Jersey, waiting for a property to become available so that he could found a monastery. A former Episcopal priest and member of the Order of the Holy Cross at Graymoor in New York, he had been received into the church in 1909 at Downside Abbey in England; here he found the reality of a Benedictine vocation he had earlier experienced as an Anglican seminarian.

A young Leonard Sargent

After being ordained by Cardinal O’Connell in Boston in 1910, he served as a curate in Brookline before being given permission to be chaplain at the Newman Academy in New Jersey. It was here that Father Sargent decided to found a monastery in the tradition of Downside, and accordingly he applied for admission to the community of that Abbey. After making his simple profession, he returned to the United States and resumed his chaplaincy at Newman. While at the school, he formed a friendship with one of the students, later to become one of America’s foremost writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the monastery library is a copy of a book given by him to Dom Leonard for Christmas and inscribed with the poem composed for the occasion.

Dom Benedict Brosnahan

Just two weeks after the Armistice, marking the end of hostilities, Dom Leonard came to Portsmouth to celebrate a Mass of thanksgiving for the purchase of the Hall estate which would become the nucleus of his monastery. Appropriately, the occasion of the Mass was the First Sunday at Advent, but it was not until June of the following year that he was able to take up residence with another monk, Dom Benedict Brosnahan, an American who had been professed a Downside and who also had the idea of starting a house of the English Congregation in America. In 1919 the house was given canonical status, becoming a “domus formata”. Dom Leonard envisioned the founding of a school at Portsmouth, but lacked the means to accomplish this. In the meantime, the monastery would serve as a center for retreats, scholarship, the liturgy and other specifically monastic pursuits. Under Downside, however, the monastery did not prosper, since American vocations were few, and short-lived when they did come. In 1926, therefore, since the mother house in England could not afford to send the needed monks, the monastery was turned over to Fort Augustus in Scotland, with Dom Leonard given the option of remaining at Portsmouth or returning to England.