The year was 1206; the place Prouille, France, and it happened like this: Dominic de Guzman was accompanying his bishop Diego on an ecclesiastical mission when he noticed the confusion of the people of the region.

He also noticed that the Papal Legates sent to preach to the Albigensian heretics were ineffective – they travelled like princes on horseback with full retinue while the heretics preached barefooted and poor.
Dominic advised the legates to jettison their pomp and splendour and return to the simplicity and fervour of Jesus and the apostles – this was what attracted the people to the heretics. Thus was born in Dominic’s mind a band of preachers who would study and preach the truth of the Gospel and witness to the simplicity of Gospel values.

The nuns of the Order of Preachers came into being when our holy Father Dominic gathered women converts to the Catholic faith in the monastery of Blessed Mary of Prouille. These women, free for God alone, he associated to his “holy preaching by their prayer and penance”.

Rosary Monastery Chapel entrance

The Order of Preachers had not yet been founded; it was rather a question of its institution, as St Dominic was still dedicating himself fully to the ministry of preaching. And so, from the death of Bishop Diego of Osma until the Lateran Council, approximately ten years passed during which brother Dominic was practically alone in the region.

Eight hundred years have now passed since this historic event. As we consider what is, in some way, the first Dominican community, truly the hidden seed of the Order, analogously we celebrate as well the theological priority that contemplation holds in our life and mission.

“It is truly right and just that we thank God for our contemplative Sisters! They support us in the path we follow; they participate in a special way in our preaching; they welcome us that we may share the hopes and joys, the grief and anxiety of our itinerant ministry. As St Catherine of Siena did, so they encourage us to have no fear, to go forth in the highways and byways to meet those who thirst for God, they compel us to live a passion for Christ and for humanity.

We must live this anniversary with the serene joy of St Dominic. God willing and with the whole of the Order of Preachers, beginning with the first Sunday of Advent (December 3, 2006) and continuing through the Epiphany in 2008, we will celebrate a Jubilee Year, dedicated to the memory of these 800 years of our contemplatives. We will live a ‘novena’ of years that will take us to another important event: the 8th centenary of Pope Honorius III’s confirmation of the Order with the Bull Religiosam Vitam of December 22, 1216.” (Fr Carlos, Master)

The year 2006 not only marks the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Dominican Nuns, but from the perspective of our inmost charism, it is the beginning of the whole Order of Preachers. Fr Carlos Aspiroz Costa, the Master of the Order, has designated every Dominican monastery chapel in the world as a place of pilgrimage from the First Sunday of Advent 2006 until the Epiphany of Our Lord 2008. Pope Benedict XVI has freely granted a plenary indulgence to all Christ’s faithful who visit a Monastery Chapel and recite the Lord’s Prayer and Creed (in addition to the usual conditions of confession, communion and prayers for the Pope).

We, the present community of Rosary Monastery look back across the centuries with awe and deep gratitude to Divine Providence who has brought our nuns to Trinidad through a winding and rough journey from France to Spain, across the Atlantic to South America, then from Venezuela in 1874.

During the Civil War, the government with Antonio Guzman Blanco as President ordered the suppression of all existing convents in the Republic. Blanco himself expelled the Sisters from their Monastery and the poor Sisters found themselves cast into the streets without help or shelter.

The Prioress, Mother Mary of Jesus Almenar, wrote to their bishop, Monsignor Guevara, who was already in exile in Trinidad. He had been welcomed here by Archbishop, Monsignor Gonin and the Dominican Fathers; and now in the absence of His Grace who was in Europe, the Co-Adjutor, Monsignor O’Carroll invited the nuns to take refuge in Trinidad.

The nuns arrived in Trinidad on October 25, 1874, and thanks to the hospitality of the Dominican Tertiaries they found a temporary abode among the orphans in what is now St Dominic’s Children’s Home. After 15 months, they moved to their own Calvary Hill, East Dry River Convent – a crude, unpainted house that they built on a parcel of land donated to them by the Archbishop.

 They lived as real refugees earning their sustenance by making altar bread on a charcoal fire, and making and laundering altar linens for the Cathedral parish. Their daily food was salt fish and rice; only the sick Sisters could get milk and they saved the wax from church candles to provide light at night. One Sister even had a luxury of a bottle of “candle-flies”.

After 10 years on Calvary Hill, the nuns, through the intervention of Divine Providence and a few donations were able to purchase, by auction, a property adjacent to Rosary Church and eventually moved into the building that now houses St Rose’s Girls’ RC School.

Rosary Monastery was now canonically installed into the archdiocese; they received good vocations and were able to live their full monastic life – Choral Office and daily Mass. Their choir was annexed to the left of the sanctuary of Rosary Church, which was only recently renovated.

The community now numbered 33 Sisters who were cramped for space and the city was encroaching upon them. Through their stringent economy and the generosity of the people of Trinidad, the nuns acquired what used to be the Huggin’s Estate in the country – St Ann’s, where there were just a few houses. The Sisters now had gardens and cows – they could get milk! The year was 1930.

Today, we continue to live our contemplative life in a secular society. We experience the confusion and ignorance about God as did our first nuns at Prouille. We feel the pains and anxieties of our beloved country, the world and the Church.

We believe that now more than ever before, the world is in need of women who live a deeply contemplative life, who are open to God and each other and who, by their lives will be a prophetic witness to God’s love in the world and in the Church. We need women to join our ranks and ensure the continuance of this dynamic heritage.