Good Influences

Father Jerome (1907–1985), a monk of the Trappist abbey of Sept-Fons in central France, lived virtually unknown outside the cloister. He wrote not for publication, but as part of his quiet formation of the generation of monks who have led his community to its present flourishing. Published after his death, his writings have filled some twenty volumes in France, revealing one of the great spiritual masters of the twentieth century.

Good Influences, the first of his Spiritual Works to appear in English, opens an intimate path to his life and teaching. Asked by a young monk in 1975 to record the influences that had shaped him, Father Jerome promised “nothing but small events.” What he crafted was one of the most moving accounts of a Christian and contemplative vocation in the twentieth century, told as a story of others’ good deeds: his mother’s prayers in childhood, his friendship with a circle of artists, the discipline of his school teachers, and the exemplary monks who formed him, including Dom Godefroid Bélorgey and Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, author of The Soul of the Apostolate. Speaking with simplicity and authority, these pages are an invitation to all Christians who want to enlarge their capacity for learning, for silence, for God.

FATHER JEROME (1907–1985) was born on the island of Rhodes to a family from Fribourg, Switzerland. He trained as an agricultural engineer before entering the Trappist abbey of Notre-Dame de Sept-Fons in 1928. He spent the remaining fifty-six years of his life there, serving as a teacher of philosophy and theology, and as a spiritual father. Twelve days before his death, he gave his last class from his infirmary bed. In the 1970s, when vocations were declining sharply across Europe, Father Jerome guided a small group of young monks who would later lead the community and carry its monastic life to new foundations. Sept-Fons is today a flourishing monastery. Almost none of his writings appeared during his lifetime. Since his death, some twenty volumes have been published in French, including a multivolume edition of his Spiritual Works from Éditions Ad Solem. His life has also been the subject of a major biography. Good Influences is the first of his works to appear in English.