Rev. Eleutherius Winance; survived internment to found Calif. abbey; at 100

Father Winance, an exceptionally vigorous centenarian, died last Saturday at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster after a heart attack, said the Rev. Damien Toilolo, the prior administrator of St. Andrew’s. Father Winance had maintained a full schedule of prayer, study, and preaching, including celebrating Mass at a juvenile hall and a convalescent home, in the week preceding his death.

St. Andrew’s Abbey, a Roman Catholic institution of the Benedictine order of priests and brothers, is famous for playing host to an arts and crafts festival that attracts 20,000 visitors each fall to its rustic 500-acre spread in the foothills of the Antelope Valley. What may be less well known is the role that Mao Zedong’s communist revolution played in the creation of this Benedictine community more than 50 years ago.

Father Winance - named for Saint Eleutherius, the patron of freedom - entered the monastery of St. Andre in his native Belgium when he was 17. In 1936, the year after he was ordained a priest, he was sent to China, where two of his fellow priests had established a monastery in Sichuan. He helped start an elementary school and a seminary for the Diocese of Nanchong in 1937 and twice a year walked from village to village helping the Chinese parish priests bless marriages and give First Communion.

He and his fellow monks were cut off from the rest of the world during the Sino-Japanese war, which lasted from 1937 to 1945. When hostilities ended, the monastery relocated to the provincial capital of Chengdu, where the monks opened the Institute of Chinese and Western Cultural Studies with a library that eventually had 10,000 volumes.

Chengdu, the last stronghold of the Nationalist Party, was overrun by Mao’s army on Christmas Day 1949. The Communists closed the institute, confiscated the books, and forced Father Winance and the others to indoctrination sessions on Marxism.

“In time, the brainwashing became progressively worse,’’ Father Winance told the Los Angeles Times in 1963. “They repeated and repeated their doctrine. They attempted to prove their point by scientific argument. But we refused to budge.’’

In 1952, after police interrogated him and accused him of being a member of a seditious organization, the Legion of Mary, he was expelled from China, along with six other priests and five nuns. They left behind two Chinese Catholic monks, one of whom spent 27 years in prison.

Under armed guard, Father Winance’s party traveled 3,000 miles by ship, bus, train, and foot to Guangzhou and, finally, to Hong Kong. Upon his arrival in the British colony, he wrote to his mother, “I come from hell.’’

His abbot sent Father Winance to teach philosophy at Sant’ Anselmo, the Benedictine college in Rome, for four years. Father Winance also wrote an account of his experiences in Communist China, “The Communist Persuasion, A Personal Experience of Brainwashing,’’ that was published in 1958.

In 1961, after teaching at St. John’s University in Minnesota, he joined eight of his brethren from China in Valyermo, Calif., where St. Andrew’s Priory was established on a former turkey ranch in 1956. The priory was upgraded to an abbey in 1992.

Father Winance, who earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1934 from the University of Louvain in Belgium, taught at Claremont Graduate University for 38 years, until his retirement in 2001.

A specialist on medieval and continental philosophy and phenomenology, he was “always very down to earth and poignant,’’ said Patricia Easton, a professor. “He was a very funny person.’’

At the abbey he rose before dawn for prayer and spent hours reading scripture in Greek or Latin and texts on philosophy and mathematics in French.

Every Saturday for the last 15 years, he celebrated Mass at a juvenile detention center in Lancaster. On Thursdays he gave the service for, as he called them, the “old folks’’ at a nearby convalescent home.

On Aug. 13, he appeared near collapse after giving the Mass at the nursing home and was taken to the hospital, where he died two days later.

“I think it would be fair to say that he would have wanted to be known as a good, faithful, and obedient monk,’’ Toilolo said.