PORTSMOUTH ABBEY | Monastery in the 1940s

PORTSMOUTH PRIORY MONKS IN THE 1940s

Standing: Aelred (Barney) Wall, Andrew Jencks, Hilary, John, Crepeau, Julian, Peter, David
Seated: Placid, Crenier, Richard, Prior Gregory Borgstedt, Hugh Diman, Wilfrid Bayne, Joseph
Missing from Photo: Alban, Ansgar

The monks I got to know quite well when I was a student there in 1955-58 were Fr Aelred, Fr Andrew, Fr Hilary, Fr Peter, Fr Wilfred, Fr Alban.

PORTSMOUTH | Priory/Abbey School 1958 and Today (Updated Apr 11, 2017)

Portsmouth Priory (as it then was called) had a community of 24 Benedictine monks when I was there in 1955-58. All but two of the monks are in the photo above. The year before, Fr Aelred ("Barney") Wall, Headmaster, was in the photo; he switched to a more contemplative monastery in my senior year. The strength of the monastery may have peaked a few years later when Luke, Paul, Anselm and Gregory became novices.

The lay faculty numbered 16 in 1958, as indicated in the photo below. So of a total teaching pool of 30 (24 monks and 16 lay), three-fifths was monastic.

As vocations to monastic life have fallen off, and older monks have gone to their eternal reward, the ratio of monks to lay staff has reversed. The lay faculty today outnumbers the monks. On the Abbey web site five monks are shown as actively involved in the school, while the Portsmouth directory shows 116 on staff.

Since 1958, the number of seniors has grown from 35 to 94 in the Class of 2017. The teaching faculty has grown from 30 to 50, supported now by, it appears, 66 listed non-teaching staff.

Similar trends are observable in other monastic institutions. Ampleforth Abbey and College in England is one of the houses of the English Benedictine Congregation (along with Downside) that founded Portsmouth. Ampleforth is one of the largest religious college-preparatory schools in the country. The number of monks has fallen at Ampleforth, from more than 100 when I was there in 1952-55 to about 30 today. 

At Ampleforth today, according to its Headmaster Fr Wulstan, who was in New York City this past week, monks are placed in roles where they can have a maximum influence on the spiritual life of the boys and girls at the school. Almost all of the teaching is now assigned to people who recruited for their teaching skills and academic background.

PORTSMOUTH | Rev. Dom Leo van Winkle, Headmaster

Rev. Dom Leo van Winkle, who became Headmaster
of Portsmouth Abbey (then Priory) School in 1957,
the fall of my senior year.

A Portsmouth lunch in Vero Beach last week made me think about the headmaster who took over at Portsmouth in 1957, the beginning of my senior year.

He came in to his Physics 2 class–I think there were four of us in a single row–in the first week and announced that he had been made headmaster and was quite clear about not being happy about it.

He replaced Dom Aelred ("Barney") Wall, who was worn out by his years as headmaster and was given leave to pursue a more contemplative life, first at the Mt Savior Monastery in Pine City, near Elmira, N.Y and then at the Benedictine monastery of Christ in the Desert in California.

Rev. Dom Thomas Leo van Winkle, or "Father Leo" as I knew him, was the son of Professor Cortlandt van Winkle, a Princeton graduate (AB, MA, Ph.D.) who with his wife converted to Roman Catholicism during the interwar years when Ronald Knox and others were showing the way. Knox, of course, was Anglican Chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford (where I was in 1962-64) during the Great War, and gave up the Chaplaincy when he converted to Catholicism in 1917.

Born in New Haven, Thomas van Winkle–as he was called until he became a monk–attended Portsmouth (Class of 1939) and received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in chemical engineering at Yale. He then went to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M. He told his students in his Physics 2 class that in the early tests of the atomic bomb the scientists were not sure how destructive the chain reaction they were setting up would be, and that some feared it would be even more destructive than in the first tests and in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war, Thomas joined the Brookhaven National Lab to focus on disposal of radioactive waste, continuing the development of an air-scrubber at the University of Pennsylvania. The system he worked on was used to control pollution on the subsequently developed nuclear submarines. So a cousin of mine who commanded a nuclear submarine was a beneficiary of his work.

In 1949, now by legend suffering from angst at the destructiveness of the bomb he had helped unleash on the world, Thomas entered the Portsmouth Monastery, then a Priory, taking the name Leo. Seven years later he was ordained a priest. The students at Portsmouth were in awe of the stresses that Father Leo must have been subjected to in putting together the bomb and then seeing what it did in Japan.

The Portsmouth Abbey Cemetery
where Fr. Leo is buried.

Fr. Leo believed the nuclear arms race was ''the great moral dilemma of the closing years of the 20th century.''

In 1973, after 16 years presiding over a major expansion of Portsmouth Abbey, Dom Leo van Winkle returned to Yale as visiting lecturer in engineering and applied sciences. His successor as Headmaster was Dom Gregory Floyd '57, who served for 10 years.

In 1975, Fr. Leo joined the faculty at Catholic University in Washington, teaching chemical engineering and chairing the department in 1981. He returned to Portsmouth Abbey in 1983 and was reappointed headmaster in 1986. He died two years later of cancer of the lymphatic system, at Jane Brown Hospital in Providence, at 65 years old. He is buried in the Portsmouth Abbey Cemetery, No. PO030 in the online listing of grave sites in Portsmouth, R.I.

Gravestone of Fr. Leo's niece, who died at
15. His brother Cortlandt van Winkle 
is buried with her.

Fr. Leo was survived by two siblings - a brother, Cortlandt van Winkle of Salem, Ore., and a sister, Mother Teresa, Prioress of the Carmel of Mary Immaculate in Flemington, N.J.

Cortlandt, a Pacific Theater veteran of World War II, died in 2010 and was buried in the Holyrood Cemetery in Seattle, Wash. with his daughter Carolyn, who died at 15, predeceasing him by 36 years. There seems to be only one tombstone for both father and daughter.

Fr. Leo's obituary by Glenn Fowler was published in The New York Times on May 3, 1988. A thoughtful article about Fr. Leo was published in the Portsmouth Bulletin in 2012 by Fr. Damian Kearney '45, who prepared for the priesthood at the same time as Fr. Leo and taught me English. Fr. Damian's brother (to close the loop) was at the Portsmouth luncheon on Monday.