Koningshoeven Abbey

Koningshoeven Abbey is a monastery of the Trappists founded in 1881 in Berkel-Enschot in North Brabant, the Netherlands. In 1880 the situation facing monastic orders in France was highly unfavourable. The monks of Mont-des-Cats Abbey , near Godewaersvelde in Nord, northern France, fearing that they were about to be driven into exile, looked for a place of refuge in another country. Abbot Dominique Lacaes sent Father Sébastien Wyart, formerly an officer of the Zouaves, to the Netherlands, where he had many military contacts. Through his former lieutenant, Antoine Arts, and Father De Beer, the superior of the CMM Brothers, he made the acquaintance of the manufacturer Caspar Houben, proprietor of De Schaapskooi , a group of three farmsteads built by the then Crown Prince Willem in 1834 in Berkel-Enschot to the east of Tilburg. Houben was prepared to lease the properties, equipped and refurbished to the point that they were serviceable as a small and primitive monastery, to the French community. Dom Lacaes did not want at first to found a new monastery, just to find suitable temporary accommodation, but on the insistence of Father Wyart, whom in the meantime he had appointed prior, he eventually agreed on 5 March 1881.

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