Voices in the Wilderness

The mid-morning sun streams through a wall of windows, filling the hilltop retreat with light just as the men’s voices join in solemn chorus. Eleven “alleluias” rise, richly resonant with tenor and baritone depth. Interlocked in harmony, their sound creates a structure as sturdy as the massive logs that frame the airy room.

Western North Carolina is used to musical expressions of old-time religion, but perhaps none quite this old. The practicing choir are all members of the Marian Friars Minor, a religious order following a lifestyle St. Francis of Assisi established in 1223. Each wears close-cropped hair, a simple robe of thick brown cloth, a white rope tied around his waist, and a pair of sandals, an outfit that hasn’t changed in centuries.

Under the guidance of the group’s founder, Friar Anthony Serviam Maria, the men are living out their faith in the heavily Protestant mountains between Burnsville and Spruce Pine. Most of their prayers are in Latin, following rubrics laid down before the Roman Catholic Church’s widespread adoption of English and other changes through the Second Vatican Council in 1962. None are ordained, so on Sundays they seek out parishes that offer traditional Latin Mass.

While their way of life may be old, the friars themselves are not. All except Friar Anthony, a vigorous Gen Xer with a greying beard, are in their 20s and 30s. Even as professions to religious life are in decline across most of the church, the Marian Friars Minor have attracted new vocations since Anthony started the group in 2018, with 14 currently in the community. 

He’s also established a thriving Third Order—a cohort of Catholic laypeople who choose to observe similar rules of prayer and fasting while living out in the world. That group has grown to over 450 members across the world, the majority of them young men with families. (Women can join the Third Order but cannot become friars.)

Anthony says young people often find the friars’ traditionalist approach to be more spiritually fruitful than what they find in other Catholic institutions. And research supports his observation that religiosity is growing among the youth: According to the General Social Survey, Gen Z was the only American cohort in which more people identified as religious in 2022 than in 2020.

“They see the activity that has been so important for the last 50 years—just be active, do all this stuff—and it’s not leading to anything. They don’t feel like they’re becoming holy,” he says. “The Zoomers, most particularly, are very much attracted to a life of prayer and holiness.”

Yet the same practices that have attracted youthful energy have also put the friars in awkward tension with the mainstream of the church. Catholic authorities have been trying to modernize the faith, limit the use of Latin in liturgy, and engage with popular culture, particularly since the election of Pope Francis 12 years ago. In a 2021 letter to bishops, Francis connected older forms of worship with the rejection of current church authority, urging those Catholics to adopt the contemporary liturgy “in due time.”

Liturgical differences have complicated Anthony’s path in religious life and were a major reason he led his group to the mountains of North Carolina from Covington, Kentucky. The tension arose again in January, when Bishop Michael Martin, leader of the more than 530,000 Catholics in the Diocese of Charlotte, published a letter in the Catholic News Herald stating that the friars are operating in the region without his permission and should not be allowed to speak or serve anywhere in the diocese.

“Please be advised that this group is not an officially recognized religious community,” he wrote, adding that the community “in no way represents the Roman Catholic Church (regardless of what they may claim).” 

The friars are unperturbed. They continue to build up a presence on 70 wooded acres near Burnsville, where they are building a timber-framed friary, a lodge to host group retreats, and private cabins for visitors. They’ve raised roughly $800,000 toward a $2 million goal for the effort so far, even as the diocese closes one of its own retreat sites in Maggie Valley due to financial concerns. 

Donations have covered land payments and heavy equipment, but the materials and labor are largely the work of the friars. Necessity has made them skilled at harvesting trees, running a sawmill, and putting the beams together with handmade pegs; much of their work happens under the gaze of a statue of St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters.

“As Franciscans, we’re supposed to give good example,” Anthony said of the effort, which he regularly updates supporters about via video. “Hopefully, people get inspired to just do something good. Our idea is that we can build this beautiful place, but we’re going to do it ourselves.”

From ‘Mediocre’ to Maria

The friars’ business office sits beneath their main meeting room, with a sliding door to a lower deck and an expansive view of the Black Mountains. Young men pop in and out, some wearing orange vests and beanies over their habits against the February mountain chill, admitting the dull whine of power tools.

The noise didn’t distract Anthony from talking about the path that led him to religious life. A native of Cincinnati, he grew up practicing what he describes as “a normal, kind of mediocre” Catholicism, going through the motions while not really understanding the heart of the faith. 

As he earned degrees in recreation and sports sciences from Ohio University, specializing in therapeutic recreation for people with disabilities, he attended Mass but also began studying Indigenous survival skills and Earth-centered spirituality. “My mom always told me, ‘You go to church, we’re Catholic.’ I tried to do that, but I was reading books on shamanics,” he said. “I didn’t know that’d be contradictory in any way.”  

His relationship with religion grew much more serious after moving to Idaho in 2003 to work for an adaptive adventure sports program. There, he became close with two Catholic men who encouraged him to pray regularly and took him to a traditional Latin Mass every week. At first, Anthony said, he didn’t like the unfamiliar rites and inscrutable language, but kept going out of respect for his friends.

“Finally, I got sick of it because I had no idea what was going on. I just picked up the little red book that they would have there at Latin Mass, and I started reading it,” said Anthony, referencing an explanatory booklet often used at Latin parishes. “It was talking about St. Michael the Archangel, the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph. I thought, ‘This is beautiful.’ It just all started to click, and then I understood that our Lord was present in the Blessed Sacrament. From that moment on, I was looking for a way to get out of the world.”

Feeling an urgent call, Anthony began visiting different religious orders. But he was carrying $30,000 in student loan debt, which most orders told him he needed to resolve before he could join. The response was different when he talked with the vocations director of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate in New York.

“He said, ‘You have to have faith! Our Lady can take care of all this,’” Anthony recalled. “‘She has all the money in the world.’” The Fund for Vocations paid off his debt and allowed him to join.

In 2008, he professed his final vows, swearing poverty, chastity, and obedience. He also received his new name: Anthony in honor of St. Anthony of Padua, a 13th-century Franciscan venerated as the patron of lost things; Serviam, which is Latin for “I will serve”; and Maria, in recognition of the Virgin Mary.

The Call of Tradition

As a bell rings throughout the friary, Anthony cuts his recollections short. He and the other friars walk reverently into their chapel, stopping at the door to dip their fingers in a small font of holy water, for midday prayer.

The chapel is a converted garage, but it bears few obvious traces of its past life. There’s a red-and-gold canopy above the altar, icons of Mary and the saints, and the soft glow of candlelight. The friars form a horseshoe around the altar, chanting psalms and responses in Latin.

The Catholic breviary, or book of prayers used for these rituals, was updated after the Second Vatican Council, but the friars use a version from before those alterations. Anthony believes it’s critical to preserve as many ancient traditions as possible; unnecessary changes to the practice of the faith, he believes, can amplify into changes in the faith itself. 

“Liturgy comes to us down from the apostles, and we have to ensure its authenticity,” he said. “Lex orandi, lex credendi: The law of prayer is the law of belief. If you change the law of prayer, you can change the law of belief.”

Perhaps paradoxically, these older views are gaining traction with younger generations, both here and the church at large. A 2022 survey from the Catholic University of America found that over 80 percent of priests ordained since 2020 describe themselves as theologically conservative or orthodox. The Charlotte Latin Mass Community, a diocesan group of the faithful devoted to traditional liturgy, has grown from about 50 families in 2011 to nearly 1,200 today.

Among those attracted to tradition is Friar Bernard Joseph, a 20-something with a broad smile. In college, he’d begun exploring a vocation to religious life with another group of Franciscan friars, but its focus on being part of the modern world seemed out of step with his own connection to the faith. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Friar Anthony, and after two visits to the friary in Covington knew he’d found what he was looking for.

“He told me, ‘If you want to be a religious contemplative, go somewhere that’s going to make you a saint,’” Bernard said. “It felt authentic, it felt ancient; it also felt heroic and demanding.”

Beyond their daily routines of prayer, Bernard continues, the friars work to meet many of their own needs through traditional skills, in keeping with their dedication to poverty and simplicity. They tailor their own habits, tend bees for honey and mead brewing, bake their own bread, and raise chickens for eggs.

Those eggs find their way into a hearty scramble for lunch, served alongside bread, a tangy vegetable slaw, and a thick tomato soup. After more Latin prayers of thanksgiving, the friars eat without talking at long tables as an audiobook of the first chapter of the Gospel of John reverberates through the room.

“‘Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’” the narrator reads. “John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, ‘I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, “Make straight the way for the Lord.”’” 

Stepping Out

Friar Anthony has spent his own time in the proverbial wilderness. In 2012, the Vatican placed the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate under scrutiny due to disagreements among its members about the use of the Latin Mass. 

Pope Francis then revoked their permission to use the traditional liturgy, a key element of what had attracted Anthony to the community, shortly after taking office in 2013. The incident drew international attention in Catholic circles, particularly among traditionalist critics of the new pope. 

After four years of uncertainty, Anthony received approval to leave the group and again sought direction from God. He decided to make a pilgrimage on foot between the historic mission churches of California, setting out from San Diego with little more than a water bottle, a couple of prayer books, and a change of clothes. He trusted that God would provide for his needs. Fifty days and nearly 800 miles of walking later, he emerged with a newly unshakable confidence in divine providence.

“I was putting faith in His promise, and He never let me down,” Anthony said. “It was a beautiful experience, and it’s what gave me the inspiration for this.”

Shortly after that pilgrimage, Anthony met with the former bishop of the Diocese of Covington in Kentucky, who encouraged him to establish the Marian Friars Minor as a new community. Word spread among networks of traditionalist Catholics and online, where Anthony posted his preaching on YouTube. His talks with titles like “The Problem with Worldly Catholics” and “A Way to Crush the Devil’s Head Daily” racked up tens of thousands of views. Interest started to grow. 

Ross McKnight joined the friars’ Third Order—the lay group for which Anthony offers spiritual guidance—a few years after its formation, at the suggestion of some friends from his congregation in rural Louisiana. He and his young family had started attending a traditional Latin Mass parish full-time after many other Catholic churches suspended services in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and he had been looking for a community that shared his seriousness about the faith. 

“As you’re looking at your interior life and seeing where you’re lacking, it’s very appealing to have a rule of life that’s been tried and true for centuries,” McKnight said. “It’s a means of growing spiritually and trying to be more regimented about it.”

Yet the friars were asked to leave Kentucky in May 2022 by Bishop John Iffert, who had taken over the Diocese of Covington in 2021. Both Covington officials and Anthony declined to get into the details of the situation.

However, Iffert’s subsequent actions in the case of another Covington-based Catholic group, the Missionaries of St. John the Baptist, show him at odds with traditionalist perspectives. After one of the group’s priests preached that the modern liturgy was “irrelevant” and contained “literally nothing of the old,” Iffert removed them from their parish and forbade them from conducting public ministry. 

Stormy Relations

In what Anthony regards as another example of providence in action, shortly before the Marian Friars Minor were asked to leave Covington, he’d been connected with the abbot of a California-based Ukrainian Greek Catholic group that had recently acquired a retreat in Western North Carolina. At the abbot’s invitation, the friars moved in and began calling the house the Holy Annunciation Monastery. On some Sundays, they started attending services at Ukrainian parishes like St. Basil the Great in Charlotte.

As guests of the Ukrainian church, an Eastern branch of Catholicism governed by a separate clerical hierarchy under the pope, the friars didn’t reach out to the Diocese of Charlotte after arriving here. The diocesan bishop at the time became aware of their presence, Anthony said, but didn’t raise any concerns. 

He says the first communication he received from current Bishop Martin came last September, shortly before Hurricane Helene arrived, knocking out power and communications across the region.

Well-equipped with construction tools, the friars launched into action after the storm. Social media posts show the friars with chainsaws and an excavator, clearing downed trees, mud, and even a washed-out house from local roadways.

Although they hadn’t interacted much with the community before Helene, the storm response made them fast friends with their neighbors, Anthony said. Since then, the group has performed a concert of hymns in Burnsville and added a general store to the vision for their property, where the friars could connect with neighbors more consistently. 

“One of the locals came to me—he was actually teary-eyed—and he said, ‘We were always wondering who these Catholics were,” said Anthony. “And he just said, ‘Now we know.’”

Diocesan authorities in Charlotte had been wondering the same. Spokesperson Liz Chandler said the diocese had received “questions and concerns” from both parishioners and clergy about the friars’ status in the church, and reached out to them but got no response. That spurred the diocese to investigate further.

“Upon further review, we have determined that this group is not affiliated with any recognized Franciscan community and not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church,” Chandler wrote in an email to The Assembly. “There are protocols for an organization such as this to receive recognition by the Church, and the diocese will certainly consider any new information if and when it comes to us through appropriate channels.”

Anthony regards the diocese’s position as an unfortunate misunderstanding. He says the Ukrainian abbot reached out to the diocese last year. And last month, the friars became a formal affiliate of the Ukrainian monastery. He points to a similar arrangement adopted by a Benedictine group that went under Ukrainian Catholic authority while continuing to follow many of their own traditions.

The friars’ current online presence does not go into this level of detail. Although Anthony published a YouTube update on the developments March 1, their website bills the friars as “traditional Franciscans” without any note of affiliation to the Ukrainian church. Anthony says he’s currently revising the website and plans to add a statement “that expresses our juridical affiliation” with the Ukrainian monastery.

Advancing in Retreat

Anthony didn’t expect to end up here, in the Western North Carolina woods under the wing of a Ukrainian abbot, when he first felt the call to religious life two decades ago. But he finds the situation appropriate for a follower of St. Francis, a man who contemplated the goodness of God in nature and sought a universal Catholic faith. 

Anthony is fond of citing former Pope Saint John Paul II, who called for the church to “breathe with her two lungs.” That metaphor, he says, references the need for all Catholics to be informed by the traditions of both the Western and Eastern churches like the Ukrainians.

As gravel crunches under the tires of a grey pickup truck, Anthony drives beneath the heavy, timber-framed gate to the friars’ future retreat center. Much work remains to be done; post-Helene demand has led to delays in obtaining rock to build roadways, he said, so heavy equipment has not been able to access the site. Although the friars have completed a retreat house, a graded site and part of a foundation are all that stand of the planned friary for now.

Anthony stands beneath the forest, the late winter wind rustling his robe. He doesn’t know where the friars will find the remaining funds for the project or how the situation with the Diocese of Charlotte will unfold. 

But he doesn’t doubt that things will work out.

“I really do think He wants me to do this; I can risk everything on it, because that has to do with God,” Anthony says. “Our job is to serve God, not serve our own needs, and you do that through providence.”

Daniel Walton is an Asheville-based freelance reporter covering science, sustainability, and political news. He was previously the news editor of Mountain Xpress and has written for The Guardian, Civil Eats, and Sierra. Contact him at danielwwalton@live.com.