Call on Monks to Convert to a New Source of Income

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, "Animals are God's creatures [who] %u2026 bless him and give him glory. Thus men owe them kindness." In light of this, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops "question[s] %u2026 massive confined animal feeding operations" and aspires to ensure that "animals are treated as creatures of God."

But at Our Lady of Calvary Abbey%u2014a Trappist monastery in New Brunswick, Canada, that operates a factory farm%u2014cows and chickens are denied what is natural and important to them and what God intended them to enjoy, such as relationships with one another and a chance to feel the Earth beneath their feet.


The monastery raises 240,000 "broiler" chickens for slaughter each year. The birds are crowded into massive sheds and don't see the light of day until they are trucked to slaughter. The birds are bred to grow unnaturally large and quickly, and their legs and organs can't support the crippling weight. Monks at Our Lady of Calvary also raise chicks who are shipped out to egg-laying operations, where they are confined to cages so crowded and small that they cannot spread a wing or make a nest. They stay there until they are exhausted, "spent," and sent to slaughter.

In the monastery's dairy operation, calves are separated from their mothers%u2014who are impregnated over and over in order to keep their milk flowing%u2014only hours after birth. In nature, they would spend more than a year together. Female calves are chained alone to face the Canadian winter, while male calves are reportedly shot soon after birth because they produce no milk.

These practices deny the very nature of God's creatures and His will for them, reducing these sensitive, intelligent animals to production units to be fattened for profit.

Three years before his elevation to the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI condemned such practices, stating, "Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that %u2026 hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible."

After months of dialogue, the Abbey's leadership%u2014which had stated that the monks were seriously "reflecting on" PETA's request that the monastery phase out its factory-farming operation in favor of non-animal industries, such as forestry and potato farming%u2014has boasted that the monks will continue factory farming. The monks' brothers at Mepkin Abbey%u2014following a 2007 PETA investigation of that monastery's egg-laying factory farm and after receiving your encouragement%u2014stopped caging chickens and now grow oyster mushrooms.

Please call and ask the monks of Our Lady of Calvary Abbey to convert to a humane industry, like their brothers at Mepkin Abbey did.