What is the connection between the Community of Mount Royal and Christminster?
There is no legal or canonical connection between the Monastery of Mount Royal and Christminster. When Christminster was founded, Bishop Hilarion, with the agreement of Dom Augustine of Mount Royal and Dom James of Christminster, intended the two to be autonomous, distinct and separate, and so they have remained from the beginning. The only link between the two is the person of Dom James who had served as Prior of Mount Royal before the establishment of Christminster. Dom Augustine remains the abbot of Mount Royal. Dom James is the abbot of Christminster. Christminster owes to Dom Augustine a debt of gratitude for providing the opportunity for further western-rite monastic mission within ROCOR. Indeed, ROCOR itself owes a debt of gratitude to Dom Augustine for his patient and long-suffering dedication to the mission of keeping western-rite Orthodoxy alive within ROCOR throughout many years in which he and his work went unrecognized. In recent years, both in the USA and Australia, weste
