The Emmaus Monastery is a Benedictine abbey in Prague's New Town, founded in 1347 by Charles IV for the Slavonic liturgy.
The Emmaus Monastery is a Benedictine abbey in Prague's New Town. According to the St Wenceslas tradition, a church had previously stood on the site; it belonged to the Vyšehrad chapter and, according to legend, was founded and visited by Saint Wenceslas. In the 13th century it served as a parish church.[1]
Foundation and construction
Charles IV obtained permission to found a monastery with the Slavonic liturgy from Pope Clement VI, his former tutor from Paris. He issued the foundation charter of the monastery of Slavonic Benedictines in Nuremberg on 21 November 1347.[1]
In 1348 Slavonic Benedictines using the Glagolitic script came to Prague from the monastery of Saints Cosmas and Damian on the hill of Ćokovac above the fishing settlement of Tkon on the island of Pašman near Biograd. They built their new monastery beside a church dedicated to the same saints, Cosmas and Damian.[1]
On Easter Monday, 29 March 1372, the abbey church of the Virgin Mary, Saint Jerome and the Slavic patrons, namely Saints Cyril, Methodius, Adalbert and Procopius, was consecrated. According to the source, it was then the largest church in Prague. The consecration took place in the presence of Emperor Charles IV and a number of foreign archbishops, bishops and princes, and the pope sent a legate to the ceremony.[1]
On the night of 11 December 1378 the coffin with the body of the deceased founder of the monastery, Emperor Charles IV, was laid out in the church.[1]
The Hussite period and the early modern era
On 14 October 1419 the monastery was spared destruction by the Hussites. In the following years it housed the administration of the Utraquist consistory, and the only attempt at Utraquist monastic life took place there.[1]
In 1593 the monastery became Catholic again. On 19 May 1635 Emperor Ferdinand III decided to hand the monastery over to the Montserrat Benedictines. The small Czech community that had been there moved to the Old Town, to the Church of St Nicholas in the Old Town, where it remained until the abolition of the monastery there by Joseph II.[1]
The Beuronese Congregation and the 20th century
In 1880, at the invitation of Archbishop Cardinal Friedrich Schwarzenberg, the monastery was taken over by Benedictines of the newly formed Beuronese Congregation, who had been expelled from their monastery of St Martin in Beuron. This happened on the feast of Saint Joseph, and Maurus Wolter became abbot.[1]
Between 1880 and 1885 the monastery was the mother house of the Beuronese Congregation. In 1885 Benedikt Sauter was elected abbot of the monastery, and in 1887 the Benedictines regained Beuron.[1]
After the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, part of the community was forced to leave the monastery, which contributed to the founding of new Benedictine monasteries in Neresheim and in Krzeszów-Grussau.[1]
In 1925 Arnošt Vykoukal became abbot. In the interwar period the monastery hosted liturgical weeks, and Father Metod Klement founded there the altar servers' association Legio angelica, which was strongly influenced by scouting.[1]
Abbot Arnošt Vykoukal promoted the idea of a Slavic Benedictine confederation, since male Benedictine monasteries in Slavic lands then existed only in Bohemia and in Moravia. In 1924 the monastery in Lubiń was restored from the Emmaus Monastery. In 1931 Abbot Arnošt was appointed apostolic visitor of Benedictine nuns' monasteries in Poland. The monastery made great efforts to buy back the monastery on the Sázava.[1]
The efforts of the Emmaus Benedictines to return to the original idea of the Slavonic liturgy were supported by a decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites of 21 May 1920, which allowed the Latin rite to be celebrated in Old Church Slavonic in certain places, among them Velehrad, the Sázava, Vyšehrad, the Emmaus Monastery, St Vitus Cathedral, St. George's Convent, Stará Boleslav and Svatá Hora, on certain feast days. In this connection Pope Pius XI issued a further document on 21 March 1924.[1]
The Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in the 20th and 21st centuries
Between the two world wars, the restoration of the monastery at the original site on the island of Pašman, from which the Slavonic Benedictines had come in 1348, was prepared from the Emmaus Monastery. In the same period the local small church of Saints Cosmas and Damian was adapted for the Byzantine liturgy.[1]
After 1989 the small church was repaired again. Since 13 July 2000 services have again been held in it, provided by the Greek Catholic Exarchate.[1]