St. Andrew’s, a Quiet Place for ‘Wrestling With the Devil’ : Religion: The 36-year-old Benedictine monastery has gained new status as an abbey, but it likely will retain its secluded serenity.

Roadside signs that direct nearly 35,000 visitors a year to the high desert monastery still say “St. Andrew’s Priory,” but the facility has been quietly upgraded to abbey and the community of black-robed Catholic monks has elected its first abbot.

The new status is unlikely to alter the serenity or the distinctiveness of the 36-year-old Benedictine monastery nestled next to the San Gabriel Mountains, 20 miles southeast of Palmdale.

St. Andrew’s Abbey is the only Southern California monastery where Catholics, as well as Protestant church groups, “can come to pray with the monks and can participate to some extent in our community life,” said Abbot Francis Benedict, who was elected to his post in May.

Driving past a sign reading, “No Hunting Except for Peace,” visitors reach a central core of ranch-style buildings that include a chapel, a gift shop and retreat quarters. Beyond a shaded duck pond lies 725 acres of hilly desert studded by Joshua and juniper trees.

“The desert is traditionally a place of solitude, a place for wrestling with the devil,” Benedict said.

The quiet is annually interrupted in late September when more than 20,000 people arrive for the two-day Valyermo Fall Festival--a mixture of art and craft exhibits, entertainment, food, and children’s festivities--which draws its name from a nearby hamlet.

This year, the abbey also will host a bit of ecclesiastical pomp and circumstance to mark its elevated status. In his first visit to the monastery Aug. 2, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of the Los Angeles Archdiocese will perform an abbatial blessing on Benedict and the abbey.

Although the monastery is within the archdiocese’s boundaries, the abbey is essentially autonomous. The cardinal “couldn’t come in and tell us to change something unless there was a scandal to the church or we were contradicting archdiocesan policies in dealing with the public,” Benedict said.

Benedict, 43, is equivalent in symbolic ways to a bishop. He wears a pectoral cross and a prelate’s ring as signs of his post. On certain ceremonial occasions he may don the bishop’s miter and carry a crosier, or hooked staff.

Yet, the tall, amiable product of Catholic schools in the San Fernando Valley quickly points out his limited authority. He may not ordain priests and he directs only 17 fellow monks at the monastery.

A band of Benedictine monks--expelled from communist China in 1952--established the priory at Valyermo in the Antelope Valley in 1956. By 1972, the group was strong enough in numbers and finances to shed the temporary status as a priory and win approval by Benedictine authorities in Europe to function as an abbey.

However, in keeping with the less-ostentatious mood that swept the Roman Catholic Church after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the St. Andrew’s monks decided to stay a priory.

“Abbeys in Europe are grand places with hundreds of monks and huge libraries,” Benedict said. “We didn’t have visions of grandeur.”

As Father John Borgerding ended 18 years as prior of the monastery early this year, however, the community decided that its permanent, self-sufficient status called for recognition as an abbey. It was also seen as appropriate to allow Prior John’s successor to carry the title of abbot.

They chose Benedict, who had been second in command for eight years.

“He’s definitely an extrovert, one who loves personal interaction,” said Father Philip Edwards, one of the monks. “He’s also very strict about everyone being present for the set hours of common prayer.”

Guests are allowed to attend the noon Mass and some join the monks at lunch. Otherwise, the monks pray together four more times daily, meditate twice daily, observe silence at breakfast and dinner, and lead their lives according to the Rule of St. Benedict, who founded the monastic order in 529.

When he was growing up in what was then Sepulveda, the new abbot said, he remembered studying the saint whose name was identical to his family’s. “But I didn’t visit this place until I felt attracted to monastic life at age 16,” he said.

After graduating from Alemany High School in Mission Hills, Benedict joined the monastery to begin his studies. He has not led an isolated life: He was a missionary to South Africa in 1983, made a pilgrimage to Egypt, Jerusalem and Rome last year, and works in his free time with people recovering from addictions.

The abbey hosts three Alcoholics Anonymous retreats and three Cocaine Anonymous retreats each year, he said. “This work is one of my big loves,” he said.

Although the ranks of monks have been thinned by death in recent years--only six of the founding members from China remain--Benedict is optimistic about attracting recruits. Including two monks who are close to making their final solemn professions, or vows, the community stands at 20 monks. “We hope to get up to 30 or 35 eventually,” he said.

The biggest sources of income for the monastery, which has a yearly operating budget of about $1.5 million, are the fall festival, which will be held this year on Sept. 26 and 27, and sales of religious ceramic objets d’art, including many adorned with big-eyed angels.

The monastery is raising funds to build a new youth retreat center to replace the renovated turkey sheds that have served as quarters since the 1960s.

A nagging concern at present, Benedict said, is a $30,000-a-year drain on the monastery’s budget for food to feed needy people who come to the monastery grounds.

“The need in the Antelope Valley is greater than government agencies and church cooperatives can meet,” Benedict said. “Everything we put into food boxes has to come out of our kitchen.

“We’re hoping something drops out of heaven.”