History
The monastery was founded as Belmont Priory in 1859 to be the Common Novitiate and House of Studies for the English Benedictine Congregation. Francis Wegg-Prosser, of nearby Belmont House, who had been received into the Catholic Church, can rightly be called its founder. In 1855 the church became the pro-Cathedral of the diocese of Newport and Catholic Diocese of Menevia. The Benedictine Thomas Joseph Brown was its first bishop, who is buried in the church. Belmont was unique in England by having a monastic cathedral chapter along the pattern of the Benedictine cathedral priories of mediaeval England, such as Canterbury, Winchester and Durham. The monks were the canons of the Cathedral.
A move to transfer the training of monks to the individual monasteries of the English Benedictine Congregation led to Belmont being allowed to take its own novices in 1901, and become an independent house in 1917. In 1920 Belmont was raised to the rank of an Abbey by the papal bull Praeclara Gesta. The Church ceased to be a Cathedral, it being transferred to Cardiff.
Read more about this topic: Belmont Abbey, Herefordshire
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