Ælred Carlyle

Aelred Carlyle OSB (7 February 1874 - 14 October 1955) founded, around 1895, the first regularised Anglican Benedictine community of monks.

Born Benjamin Fearnley Carlyle, he was educated at Blundell's School. In 1892, he commenced medical training at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London. He did not complete his medical training. Instead, influenced by the Oxford Movement of the period, he embraced a vision of monastic life as he envisioned it having been followed in the Middle Ages, full of ritual and tradition. A charismatic individual, Carlyle succeeded where others had failed in having the vision of such a life within the Church of England approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury. By 1895 he had established a community of monks under his leadership, taking monastic vows under the monastic name of Aelred, assuming the role of abbot.

After several moves, Carlyle's community was established on Caldey Island, South Wales in 1906. When the Caldey Island community came into conflict with the Bishop of Oxford in 1913 over conformity to Anglican practices, Carlyle and most of his monks became Roman Catholic. They were only the second such group to be received in a corporate manner into the Roman Catholic Church, the example having been set by the Society of the Atonement (Franciscan) in the U.S. several years earlier. . The secession of Caldey took place on February 21, 1913, and on March 1 that year Abbot Columba Marmion of Maredsous visited the island to assist the community in its preparations for its submission to Rome. In May 1913 Abbot Marmion took Carlyle (in Roman terms at this point a simple layman) to Rome for an audience with Pope Pius X, and on June 29 Marmion presided at the Solemn Mass at Caldey during which the community received the habit and the canonical establishment of the monastery became finalised. Following the establishment of Caldey as a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastery proper, Carlyle spent a probationary year at Maredsous before taking his solemn monastic vows in June 1914 and being ordained priest several weeks later on July 5. Although himself new to the Roman Benedictine order, he then returned to Caldey as its abbot.

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