Hong Kong’s Father Benedict Chao, world’s oldest Trappist monk, dead at 108
Trappist Father Benedict Chao, 108, died on July 31, 2026 at the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. He was the oldest Trappist monk in the world, having taken monastic vows for 79 years and priestly ministry for 77 years. Father Chao survived the Chinese communist persecution, fled to Canada and Utah where he learned cheese‑making before reestablishing the abbey in Hong Kong. Following his death, Sister Sebastiana Yamaguchi Teruko of Japan became the world's oldest Trappist religious at 107.
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Father Benedict Chao, a Trappist monk from Hong Kong who died on 31 July 2026 at the age of 108, was the world’s oldest Trappist monk. His death was announced by the Diocese of Hong Kong and noted by the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, which highlighted his 79 years of monastic vows and 77 years of priestly service. 1
Father Chao passed away at the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy on Lantau Island. His funeral was scheduled for 14 August 2026. 1
Born in 1918 in Chengting, Hebei, China, Chao entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy and survived the anti‑religious campaigns that followed the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Many monks were deported, imprisoned, or killed during that period. 1
After fleeing China, Chao and fellow monks lived briefly in Canada before moving to the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity in Huntsville, Utah, where they learned cheese‑making. The skill was later applied at their Hong Kong monastery, which produced milk, butter, and cheese. 1
In 1974, Chao was elected prior of the Our Lady of Joy community, a position he held until 1998, guiding the monastery through decades of growth and renewal. 1
With Chao’s death, Sister Sebastiana Yamaguchi Teruko of Imari Abbey in Japan, aged 107, became the oldest living Trappist religious. The order’s website also lists three other centenarian members, each 103 years old. 1
Trappist monasticism’s endurance amid 20th‑century persecution
Trappist endurance in the twentieth century was not principally a matter of institutional survival or political resistance. It was the endurance of a contemplative way of life—prayer, silence, penitence, communal fidelity, and sacrificial love—under conditions that repeatedly threatened religious communities with expulsion, isolation, imprisonment, or death. The witness of the Trappists, especially the monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, shows how monastic stability could become a form of Christian perseverance and even, in extreme circumstances, martyrdom.
Although the twentieth century supplied new forms of persecution, Trappist monasticism entered it with a long memory of suppression and exile. The French Revolution suppressed La Trappe in 1790, forcing the monks into exile under Dom Augustin de Lestrange. After eventually returning and rebuilding, the community was expelled again in 1880. The history of La Trappe therefore established a recurring pattern: persecution could destroy buildings and scatter communities without extinguishing the charism.
This earlier experience helps explain why the Trappists were able to endure later persecution. Their identity was not ultimately tied to one monastery, one nation, or one political order. When necessary, communities could relocate, establish daughter houses, and preserve their observance elsewhere. The early twentieth-century history of the Reformed Cistercians reflects this geographical adaptability: monasteries existed not only in France and other European countries but also in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
The expansion of monasteries beyond Europe was especially significant. Persecution and anti-religious legislation in Europe did not simply reduce the Order; over time, the Trappist presence became more internationally distributed. In 1962, the Holy See noted that the Order had been brought together from formerly divided branches and had grown to approximately four thousand monks in nearly eighty monasteries. This suggests that endurance involved both faithfulness to monastic discipline and institutional flexibility under changing historical conditions.
The Trappist response to persecution cannot be understood apart from the character of the vocation itself. Pope Paul VI described the monastic vocation as a preservation of “the contemplative life in its integrity and fullness” in a world increasingly marked by noise, distraction, and constant communication. He presented Trappist solitude not as an escape from reality but as a witness to the possibility of recollection and attention to God.
For Paul VI, silence was not merely the absence of speech:
“Silence consists above all in turning all the powers of the soul away from passing and empty things and directing them toward the one God.”
This interior orientation was crucial in persecution. External circumstances might remove property, restrict communication, or place the monks in danger, but the center of the vocation remained the same: seeking God through prayer, Scripture, liturgy, and charity. Paul VI connected silence with meditative reading of Scripture, study of the Bible, and growth in love of Christ. He insisted that the austerity of monastic life becomes fruitful only when animated by charity.
Thus, endurance was not simply stubborn resistance. It was a disciplined fidelity rooted in love. The external practices of enclosure, silence, manual labor, and asceticism mattered because they formed persons capable of remaining faithful when circumstances became hostile.
The clearest twentieth-century example in the available sources is the Trappist community of Notre-Dame de l’Atlas at Tibhirine, Algeria. In May 1996, seven monks were brutally killed. Pope John Paul II repeatedly interpreted their death as a decisive Christian witness rather than merely a tragic political event. He called them “martyrs of God’s love for all men” who became “artisans of peace” by giving their lives.
The circumstances are important. The monks were living in a country experiencing severe violence, and they were not simply observers removed from the local population. John Paul II spoke of the Trappist sacrifice alongside that of the Bishop of Oran and other religious, describing it as a sign of hope for Algeria and linking it to a generous fraternity with the Algerian people. Their endurance therefore had a distinctly missionary dimension, even though Trappist monasticism is fundamentally contemplative: remaining present, praying, and sharing the vulnerability of one’s neighbors can itself become a Christian witness.
John Paul II summarized this meaning in 1998:
“The sacrifice of the Trappists of Tibhirine is still present in our hearts. Martyrs of God’s love for all men, they became the artisans of peace by giving their lives.”
The monks’ witness should not be reduced to a romantic glorification of death. The Church’s interpretation emphasizes the spiritual disposition behind their fidelity: love of God, love of humanity, renunciation, and a gaze fixed on Christ. Their death became intelligible as martyrdom because it was connected to a life already shaped by self-giving.
John Paul II explicitly connected the Tibhirine monks with the central demands of discipleship. Their witness, he said, invites Christians to keep their eyes fixed on God and to live love to the end, while remembering that following Christ necessarily involves renunciation. This interpretation places martyrdom within the logic of the Trappist vocation rather than treating it as an accidental interruption of it.
The monks’ death also illustrates an important Catholic distinction: martyrdom is not the pursuit of death, but the faithful acceptance of suffering and death when fidelity to Christ and charity cannot be preserved by simply abandoning one’s vocation or one’s neighbors. The available papal texts do not provide a detailed canonical determination of the Tibhirine monks’ martyr status, but they clearly present their sacrifice as a holy and peace-making witness.
John Paul II later expressed the hope that their blood would become “the seed of many holy vocations” in Europe and elsewhere. He placed this hope beside his concern that European communities were aging and that other regions urgently needed the formation of new aspirants. Persecution, then, did not have the final word. The monks’ deaths were interpreted within the Paschal pattern of Christianity: apparent defeat can become a source of spiritual fruitfulness.
Trappist endurance was also communal. The monks were not solitary hermits but cenobites—religious who live in community. John Paul II emphasized that Trappists inhabit a “special kind of desert”: they cultivate personal solitude while remaining bound together in solidarity, sharing contemplation through the Church’s liturgy.
This balance between solitude and community has direct importance under persecution:
John Paul II’s 1987 description of the Order highlights these elements: assiduous prayer, silence, enclosure, austerity, the Divine Office, lectio divina, and charity among the brethren. The purpose of the Office is not only personal sanctification but intercession for the salvation of the world. In this perspective, a monastery under threat remains spiritually fruitful even when its public activity is minimal. Its endurance consists in continuing to perform its essential act: offering praise and intercession.
Paul VI urged the Trappists to communicate the Church’s needs and sufferings through prayer and penance, and he summarized their apostolate with a striking phrase:
“Speak to the world through your silence.”
This does not mean indifference to persecution or refusal of legitimate action. Rather, it identifies the distinctive form of Trappist witness. The monks do not ordinarily respond to violence through political power, public activism, or ideological propaganda. Their response is the sustained offering of their lives to God for the Church and the world.
John Paul II similarly thanked the Trappists because, from the silence of their cloisters, they offer continual prayer for the pope and the needs of the entire ecclesial community. This prayerful solidarity means that enclosure is not isolation in the negative sense. The monks are separated from worldly distraction precisely so that their prayer may embrace humanity more universally.
The paradox is central: the more hidden the monastic life appears, the more profoundly it can serve the Church through intercession. Under persecution, this hidden service becomes more visible because the community’s steadfastness reveals what its ordinary discipline has been forming all along.
The papal sources place Trappist suffering within the broader history of the persecuted Church. Pope John XXIII recalled bishops, priests, and laypeople who endured exile, imprisonment, and restraint rather than abandoning the Catholic faith or the work entrusted to them. Pope Pius XII likewise encouraged Christians in peril to rely upon God’s help, observing that persecutors pass away while “the word of the Lord endures forever.”
Pope Gregory XVI expressed the same confidence when he stated that the Church founded through the Cross of Christ cannot be destroyed by cruelty. These statements should not be interpreted as denying the real damage caused by persecution. Monasteries can be closed, monks can be killed, and communities can experience genuine extinction in particular places. The claim is instead theological: persecution cannot overcome Christ’s Church or nullify the grace manifested through faithful suffering.
Leo XIII had already advised religious threatened by dispersal to intensify faith, prayer, holy works, regular discipline, fraternal unity, humble obedience, detachment, and zeal for divine worship. These are precisely the virtues that made Trappist endurance possible. The response to persecution was not the abandonment of monastic identity but its purification and deepening.
Trappist endurance did not mean preserving every historical form unchanged in a merely defensive way. John Paul II urged the Order to preserve its charismatic patrimony while also recognizing its growth, especially in the Far East, and its contact with different religious traditions. He called for wise and prudent dialogue so that Christ’s light might be reflected within cultural plurality.
This reveals a distinction between fidelity and rigidity. The essential charism remains: unconditional love of God, prayer embracing humanity, recollection, communal life, liturgical fidelity, and contemplative separation from the world. But the geographical and cultural expression of that charism can develop.
The Order’s endurance amid persecution therefore rested on two complementary strengths:
Either quality without the other would be insufficient. Continuity without adaptability could become institutional fragility; adaptability without continuity could dissolve the Trappist identity.
Trappist monasticism endured twentieth-century persecution because its deepest strength was not material security but a theological center: the love of God expressed through prayer, penitence, communal fidelity, and self-offering for the world. The history of exile and rebuilding prepared the Order to survive displacement. Its disciplined silence formed monks capable of remaining faithful amid danger. Its communal and liturgical life preserved unity. And in Tibhirine, this hidden fidelity reached the form of martyrdom, interpreted by the Church as a witness to love and peace.
The Trappist lesson is therefore not simply that monasteries can survive persecution. It is that a life wholly directed toward God can continue to bear fruit even when its visible structures are threatened. As the papal witnesses emphasize, the Church’s endurance rests ultimately not on the permanence of earthly institutions but on the enduring Word of God and the grace that enables Christians to love faithfully to the end.