The Caldey Connection
Aelred Carlyle and Caldey Abbey

In 1906 Aelred Carlyle took the Anglican Benedictine community he founded in 1898 to the Island of Caldey in South Wales. When the community came into conflict with the Bishop of Oxford in 1913 over conformity to Anglican practices, Abbot Carlyle and most of his monks were received together as a group into the Catholic Church.

In 1928 the monks of Caldey moved to Prinknash in the Vale of Gloucester where the community continued to thrive. In 1943 Lord Colum Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, gave the Priory at Pluscarden in Moray and its land to the Benedictine community of Prinknash.

Life started again at Pluscarden when monks from Prinknash took up residence at Pluscarden in 1948. Seven years later the central tower of the church had been roofed and the bells of Pluscarden once again rang across the valley. Independence was granted in 1966 and in 1974 the monastery was elevated to the status of an Abbey.

When Pluscarden celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Caldey Island community being received into the Catholic Church, the two priests of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in Scotland were invited to represent the Ordinariate. During the Mass, in welcoming them, Abbot Hugh Gilbert said that members of the Ordinariate had followed a similar path when Pope Benedict XVI established the Ordinariate in the UK in 2011 ... 98 years after Caldey.