History
The congregation was founded in 1884, incorporating the houses founded on the vision of Andreas Amrhein, a monk of Beuron Archabbey, who, finding it impossible to realise the vision of the Benedictine mission within Beuron, left to begin an independent community. He set up a house in 1884 at Reichenbach am Regen in the Oberpfalz, but the site was too remote, and in 1887 the community moved to what is now St. Ottilien Archabbey in Oberbayern.
In the same year the first missionary monks left for the Apostolic Prefecture of South Zanzibar in German East Africa, a territory which now comprises several dioceses in Tanzania, which the monks serve from the abbeys of Peramiho, Ndanda and Hanga and several smaller houses. Similarly the Congregation's Zululand mission (begun in 1921) is now an independent monastery serving the diocese it once helped to create.
In 1908 an Asian mission field was added, comprising two abbeys in North Korea and China, which after the end of World War II were re-constituted as Waegwan Abbey in South Korea. There is also a priory at Digos on Mindanao Island in the Philippines.
Further monasteries were established in North and South America after World War I, and more recently several new foundations have been made in the Third World, mostly in Africa.
The Archabbot of St. Ottilien is ex officio president of the congregation.
Women religious have formed part of the Missionary Benedictine enterprise from the beginning, based at first at St. Ottilien but shortly after at their own house nearby. They have developed independently and today form the Congregation of Missionary Benedictine Sisters of Tutzing.
Read more about this topic: Ottilien Congregation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)