Bishop Paul Dupuis, 81, passed away Tuesday, September 19, 2023 in Massachusetts.
Mr. Paul Dupuis was born on 27 January 1942. His parents named him Kenneth. Of French origin, his Catholic family
lived in Garner, Massachusetts. In those days, people were naturally religious and pious, and little Kenneth grew up in the
Christian faith with his two brothers. During his childhood, he attended a Catholic school run by the Sisters of the
Assumption.At the age of eight, a rabbi from Gardner's Jewish community prophesied to him that he would become
a religious, because in a vision he saw him wearing a brown monastic habit. This same rabbi told him that he would later
learn Hebrew.
Between 1966 and 1968, he spent a year at the prestigious Sorbonne faculty of literature in Paris and travelled to Greece
and Mount Athos, the famous peninsula where hundreds of Orthodox monks live. At the Iviron monastery, he was
overwhelmed by the miraculous icon known as the quot;portaïtissa quot;. He felt a particular calling that would influence
his destiny.
He returned to the United States, but the country was plunged into race riots by the assassination of Martin Luther King on
4 April 1968. The riots spread to several major cities, including Worcester in Massachusetts, where he lived. He preached
the non-violence of Martin Luther King to young people in the black community.
In 1969, he was a French teacher at Old Forge in New York, then at Oakmont in Massachusetts. Since 1965, the
Americans had been waging a massive war in Vietnam. From 1969 onwards, theAmerican people were opposed to this
war and various demonstrations took place until 1972. He was part of a small group campaigning against the Vietnam War
and wrote anti-war poems. Called by the authorities to be drafted, he shouted anti-war poems and slogans on the bus to
Boston with other young people. Refusing to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he fled to Canada and sought the protection
of the Canadian government as a conscientious objector.
In 1968, he worked in a bookshop in Montreal. He married in the Catholic Church. During this period, he became
acquainted with a traditionalist Christian community that had broken with Rome following the Second Vatican Council.
After a short marriage, he and his wife agreed to join the religious life of this Christian family. On 29 June, he was
ordained a priest and three years later took his monastic vows on 28
April 1972. His final solemn vows took place on 27 March 1975. He was sent on mission to Guadeloupe for a year and a
half, then to Italy to help found a monastery at San Michele in Teverina in Tuscany.
Around 1980, he was sent to the Dominican Republic. There he founded a poor little monastery and chapel near Cristo
Rey, a district of the capital Santo Domingo. He began this mission with only a few dollars in his pocket. For several
weeks, he ate mainly grapefruit. He slept on the ground in a tool shed lent to him. He worked with peasants and poor
people in the capital. For more than two decades, he
ministered to the poorest people in the shantytowns, delinquents and drug addicts. Throughout his life, Mgr Paul wrote
poetry. He is considered a great poet in the Dominican Republic. He was also interested in Hindu mysticism, which he
explored following in the footsteps of the Benedictine Dom Henri Le Saux. He has given several lectures on this tradition
compared with Christian mysticism.
In 2003, he was forced to leave his religious community because of doctrinal issues, which he felt were no longer in line
with the faith of the Church. He returned to Boston and found work at Shoenhoffs bookshop in Cambridge, a city on the
outskirts of Boston. He decided to keep his religious habit to preserve his monastic life and prayed to the Virgin Mary to
find him a new community. He obtained a position as professor of French at Harvard Universitys prestigious Divinity
School in the department of literature and spiritual and mystical writings until 2016.
During a trip to France in 2008, he visited the Sainte-Présence monastery of the Celtic Orthodox Church. He immediately
realised that the Lord had answered his prayer. He discovered that Bishop Mael, then Primate of the Celtic Orthodox
Church, was born in the same town as Gardner, attended the same school and lived two streets away from his own. They
did not know each other, as they were a generation apart. Bishop Mael entrusted him with the mission of founding a
monastery in America.
He left Boston for Berryville in the state of Virginia in 2014. The Church then acquired a house on an isolated site at
Tom's Brook near the town of Woodstock, which became a dependency of the Sainte-Présence monastery in France
under the abbatial and ecclesiastical authority of the primate of the Celtic Orthodox Church. His ability to speak several
languages enabled him to maintain numerous spiritual relationships with many people around the world. He was much
appreciated for his kindness and goodwill towards everyone.