At a time when donations are becoming increasingly rare, abbeys and monasteries are rolling up their sleeves to support their communities.
The sisters, three times more numerous than the monks, show particular imagination.
Innovative products, marketing strategy, online sales, social networks: these small businesses have managed to do well.
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Their small businesses are not experiencing the crisis. And certainly not as the holidays approach! More than 200 abbeys or monasteries supplement their income by making products, from feather duvets to cheese and tableware.
A job that punctuates the days and sometimes takes us a leap into the digital age. In Boulaur, in the Gers, Sister Anne is, for example, the community manager of her abbey. Between two prayers, she promotes the monastery’s products on social networks. “If modernity brings us good and positive things, why not welcome them?”says this 43-year-old Cistercian. This year, the community is welcoming seven novices, an opportunity to see things even bigger by building an ultra-modern agricultural operation which will quadruple the production of pâtés, cheeses and jams. Except for one detail, five million euros must be found to finance the project.
From pottery to cosmetics
Small businesses like this have multiplied in France in recent years, like the monastery of the Little Sisters of Bethlehem, one of the most closed in France where Fidemaria has just entered, in the heart of the Alps. At 34, this former nurse made a radical choice: to withdraw from the world to live as a hermit, in a small chalet facing Mont-Blanc. “I go from a world where everything goes very quickly, with a lot of noise, to an intense silence that I had to tame”she explains to the Grands Reportages teams in the video at the top of this article. The only place where the novice can speak: the pottery workshop, where the sisters make stoneware dishes. A beginner, Fidemaria has everything to learn from this craft which is sold sparsely in the monastery’s small shop. To increase its income, its community is preparing to experience a revolution by creating its first online sales site.
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Products from monasteries: a divine business
Even more astonishing, some communities have already been at the forefront of commerce for more than seven decades. The Benedictines of Chantelle Abbey, in Auvergne, are at the stage of thinking about how to revive sales of their cosmetics, a surprising specialty of the place for 70 years. “The manufacture of care products is not contradictory with monastic life. Taking care of this gift that is our body is what the Lord asks of us!” explains a nun in the video at the top of the article.
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