La Valsainte Charterhouse: A Carthusian Monastery in Switzerland
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Switzerland
- Primary era
- Modern
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Swiss
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page21 sections
History
La Valsainte Charterhouse is a Catholic monastery of the Carthusian Order in Switzerland, founded in 1295 by Girard I, lord of Corbières, in the territory of the former County of Gruyère. The Carthusians follow a highly solitary contemplative life that combines individual cells with limited communal observance. La Valsainte remains the only active Carthusian monastery in Switzerland.
Medieval foundation and lordship
The monastery was formerly known in Latin as Vallis sanctorum omnium, later shortened to Vallis Sancta. The first charterhouse was probably not completed before the middle of the fourteenth century. In 1381, it was destroyed by fire. During the Middle Ages, the Carthusians held the rights of high and low justice throughout Val-de-Charmey. These rights allowed a medieval lord to administer both serious and lesser court cases, showing that the monastery exercised temporal authority alongside its religious function.
The monks also held temporal lordship over a territory that included the present communes of Charmey and Cerniat. This gave the charterhouse responsibility for land and revenues as well as for its spiritual community. In 1554, Michel, the last count of Gruyère, transferred his lordship to the city of Fribourg. La Valsainte then came under Fribourg’s authority, and the change restricted the monastery’s former autonomy and revenues. Disputes over the administration of its temporal possessions continued for a prolonged period.
Suppression and Cistercian refuge
During the Reformation, Fribourg proposed suppressing one of the canton’s two Carthusian houses and using its revenues to support the exiled bishop of Lausanne. The Holy See resisted this plan for two centuries, but authorized the suppression of La Valsainte in 1778. The monks moved to La Part-Dieu Charterhouse, while La Valsainte’s revenues were assigned to the Diocese of Lausanne. The suppression was attributed to “the misfortunes of the times and the harsh necessities of circumstances,” rather than to a decline in monastic discipline.
In 1791, French Trappists from La Trappe Abbey, fleeing the revolutionary upheaval under Dom Augustin de Lestrange, obtained use of the vacant monastery. Trappists belong to the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, a reform of the wider Cistercian tradition known for strict discipline and contemplative practice. La Valsainte became a Cistercian abbey in 1794 and an important center of renewed Cistercian reform.
After the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798, the community received permission from Tsar Paul I to settle in the Russian Empire. The monks were expelled from that empire in 1800, returned to La Valsainte, and occupied it intermittently until 1815. They then left Switzerland to restore Cistercian life in France.
Redemptorists and Carthusian restoration
From 1817, La Valsainte housed Redemptorists led by Father Joseph Passerat. The Redemptorists were founded for preaching and pastoral missions, an apostolic way of life that proved poorly suited to the monastery’s secluded location. They withdrew during the 1820s, after which the buildings deteriorated and became partly ruined.
Fribourg suppressed La Part-Dieu Charterhouse in 1848. The return of a conservative, pro-Catholic government in 1863 enabled the Carthusians to recover La Valsainte. The remaining property of La Part-Dieu was restored, and La Valsainte was purchased, restored, and largely rebuilt with assistance from the Grande Chartreuse and from La Part-Dieu’s remaining resources. Most of the present complex dates from the last third of the nineteenth century.
Expansion and twentieth-century community
The community grew from the late nineteenth century, reinforced by Carthusian monks expelled from French monasteries under France’s anticlerical separation laws. A novitiate opened at La Valsainte in 1903 because French houses could no longer receive all potential vocations. The monastery consequently attracted candidates, including many from Switzerland. The General Chapter of the Carthusian Order met at La Valsainte in 1903 and 1904.
After the early twentieth-century expansions, the monastery was planned for 38 choir monks and approximately 30 lay brothers. Its community exceeded fifty religious on three occasions during the twentieth century, but vocations declined from the 1970s onward. It numbered nine fathers and seven brothers in 2011, and approximately 15 members in 2023.
The conventual church, dedicated to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, was consecrated on 10 August 1910 by Bishop Abbet, titular Bishop of Bethlehem and abbot of Saint-Maurice d’Agaune. During the twentieth century, La Valsainte also became an influential center of Catholic monastic spirituality. It admitted ecclesiastical retreatants and some laypeople. Charles Journet, a Swiss Catholic theologian who later became a cardinal, and Jacques Maritain, a French Catholic philosopher, helped disseminate an idealized image of Carthusian life. Jacques Loew converted to Catholicism after attending Mass there in the early 1930s. Cardinal Charles Journet was buried in the religious cemetery in 1975 according to the Carthusian burial rite.
War, liturgical change, and conservation
During the Second World War, the Swiss Army stored ammunition reserves in the monastery’s cellars for several months. Prior Nicolas Barras, who maintained links with the apostolic nuncio in Bern, carried out missions for his order in France, Germany, and Italy and was involved in wartime networks of communication and refuge. La Valsainte also hosted a secret meeting in 1938 involving Italian communists and representatives associated with the Holy See, who considered possible cooperation against Nazi expansion.
In the 1970s, the conventual church was comprehensively rearranged in response to the liturgical reforms associated with the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic council held from 1962 to 1965. The community gradually adopted French for readings and parts of the liturgy, while most offices continued to be sung in Latin and Gregorian chant.
Structural instability in the southern part of the monastery led to the demolition of 14 of 23 small houses built between 1890 and 1902. Runoff and groundwater had undermined the buildings on inadequately stabilized fill. Demolition, drainage of the monastery’s subsoil, and wastewater treatment were completed on 9 September 2008. La Valsainte is situated in the Diocese of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg and is listed in Switzerland’s Federal Inventory of Sites Built for Protection of National Importance. French is the house language, although a substantial proportion of the community is German-speaking.
Remains
La Valsainte lies at approximately 1,014 metres above sea level in the Javroz valley, at the southern foot of the La Berra massif. The Javroz stream runs through the valley before flowing into the Lac de Montsalvens reservoir. The monastery’s surviving fabric combines a fourteenth-century church vault and an eighteenth-century facade with a much larger complex rebuilt and expanded from the 1860s through the early twentieth century.
Early church and eighteenth-century fabric
Fourteenth-century vault
The oldest surviving fabric consists of two western bays of the church vault. Dating from the fourteenth century, they probably belong to the original church built during the first half of that century. The vault is constructed in tuff stone and survived the later destruction and rebuilding that changed much of the monastery.
Church facade
The church was restored internally and externally in 1729, when its surviving facade was built. Its pediment bears the date and the cartouche Soli Deo, meaning “For God alone.” An extensive fire in 1732 destroyed the church roof and communal buildings, leaving the facade and part of the earlier vault as important elements of the present church.
Nineteenth-century monastery
Church and external buildings
The external chapel and guesthouse were built in 1865, and the conventual church was completed in 1866. These buildings belong to the rebuilding that followed the Carthusians’ recovery of La Valsainte. The late-nineteenth-century complex also included monks’ cells, a lay-brothers’ building, workshops, the great cloister, refectories, and an enclosure.
Cells and workshops
The current lay-brothers’ building, part of the workshops, and cells identified as L, R, S, T, U, V, X, and Y were constructed in 1886. In 1901, the church, great cloister, refectories, and enclosure were enlarged, while a novitiate cloister was built. The twelve small houses of the 1868 great cloister were supplemented by two new ranges containing 13 and 11 cells. This brought the complex to 36 cells, apart from the prior’s residence and the procurator’s offices.
Novitiate cloister and chapel
Novice accommodation
The novitiate complex included a range of cells for novices and temporarily professed monks. A smaller group near the access road contained the novice master’s cell, a chapel, and a small library for novices. A novitiate is the part of a religious community devoted to the training and probation of novices, while a lay brother traditionally carried out practical rather than clerical duties.
Novitiate chapel
In the 1960s, Dom Claude Besson converted the original novice master’s cell into a library. He also rearranged the southern section of the chapel to give a different orientation to the cubiculum and Ave Maria. The chapel’s north wall was faced with pebbles from the Javroz River, and a T-shaped altar made from the same material was rebuilt against it beneath a wooden crucifix. The floor and other walls were finished in wood.
The chapel served as the novice master’s chapter room for a weekly conference and as the place where novices held their chapter of faults. The novice master ceased to live in the complex in the early 1990s.
Demolished small houses
Runoff and groundwater weakened the buildings of the novitiate cloister, causing wall collapses and major cracking. Fourteen of the 23 small houses were demolished, including cells AA through MM and cells N and O of the intermediate cloister. Ground markings incorporated into the redesigned landscape represent the former buildings.
Conventual church interior
Liturgical rearrangement
During the church restoration of the 1970s, nineteenth-century interior decoration was removed except for the stalls, which were slightly modified. The dividing screen between the choir of the fathers and the choir of the lay brothers was dismantled, and the sanctuary was completely reorganized. The former diamond-patterned parquet floor was replaced by paving, while the parquet was reused in the library.
Artworks and furnishings
The restored church contains non-figurative stained-glass windows by the Fribourg painter Bernard Schorderet. Its enamel tabernacle and processional cross were made by the French artist Raymond Mirande. A fourteenth-century Gothic Madonna from a workshop in Moselle stands to the left of the main altar.
Religious cemetery
The cemetery contains the grave of Cardinal Charles Journet. In keeping with Carthusian practice, the grave cross is anonymous. Journet’s cross was deliberately placed at the center of the cemetery so that the grave could be readily located.
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