When Benedictine Volunteer Corps (BVC) volunteers return home after a year immersed in schools, clinics, orphanages, monasteries, and cultural landscapes across the globe, the question that follows them is deceptively simple: What’s next?

From August 1 to August 3, the Abbey and University campus in Collegeville became a place of both welcome and transition. The “Welcome Home” retreat gathered returning volunteers, young men who had prayed in Montserrat, taught in Rwanda, served in Guatemala, and lived in rhythm with monastic communities across the world for a weekend designed to bridge service and the next steps of their journey.

Friday, August 1 – Settling In

The retreat opened with space to breathe. Volunteers wandered familiar paths on campus, no longer guests abroad but pilgrims returning to a home that has also changed in their absence. Evening Mass in the Abbey Church set the tone, followed by a communal dinner where the chicken curry, cooked by Fr. Geoffrey, was as much an act of hospitality as it was nourishment.

The evening ended with Margaret Conway leading a conversation titled “Coming Back to Reality: Carrying Service Forward.” Her words invited the group to wrestle with how experiences of poverty, resilience, and community abroad could be integrated into new realities of graduate programs, first jobs, and uncertain futures.

Saturday, August 2 – Reintegration & Community

The morning began Benedictine style, with prayer. Volunteers then picked up rakes and gloves for a campus clean-up and work in the monastic gardens. The work was ordinary, but after a year of extraordinary, ordinary is precisely what many needed.

The heart of the day came in Fr. William Skudlarek’s talk on reverse culture shock. Drawing from his own studies abroad in the late 1960s, he shared how coming back home often disorients more than leaving in the first place:

He encouraged volunteers to expect moments of frustration or disconnection, but to see them as signs of growth:

The conversation resonated deeply with volunteers reflecting on their own challenges, walking into an American grocery store, hearing old friends complain about “small problems,” or realizing just how much they themselves had changed.

By the afternoon, it was time for joy: a BVC vs. Monks volleyball match, cookout dinner, evening prayer, and a bonfire filled with storytelling.

Sunday, August 3 – Sending Forth

Sunday morning carried the weight of benediction. At Mass, Fredi Ponce Parra stepped forward to read, symbolizing the shared vocation that continues beyond a year of service.

The retreat closed with brunch at Kay’s Kitchen in St. Joseph, where the conversations shifted from reflection to anticipation: new graduate programs, government service, medical school, teaching, and the many unknowns that follow such a liminal season.

Since 2003, the Benedictine Volunteer Corps has sent more than 350 graduates across the world to live, pray, and work alongside monastic communities. The “Welcome Home” retreat is not a conclusion but a hinge: a moment where the gifts of service are named, blessed, and sent outward. In that sense, the retreat is both a homecoming and a commissioning. For these Johnnies, home is no longer just a place; it is a way of being carried into every next step.

By the time dawn burns off the dew on the University of Minnesota’s research plots, the camelina is already working, flowering early for hungry pollinators, knitting soil against spring runoff, and packing oil into seeds the size of a whisper. It is quiet, patient work. The kind Matthew Ott learned to respect long before the lab coat, first in Cobán, Guatemala, then in Santiago, Chile, where a year of Benedictine Volunteer Corps service taught him that lasting change begins with humble, daily fidelity.

Ott, now a researcher with the U of M’s Forever Green Initiative, is part of a team refining winter camelina, an ancient oilseed akin to canola, into a modern tool: a cover crop that survives Minnesota winters and a feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The promise is elegant: plant in fall, bloom early, harvest in late spring, then relay soybeans through the stubble. Same acres, more value, less erosion. The oil can go to the kitchen or the jet engine; the meal can feed livestock. For farmers juggling tight margins and volatile weather, it’s a second crop layered into the same season. For aviation, it’s a lifeline toward decarbonization.

The climate stakes are not subtle. Aviation remains a stubborn slice of global emissions, and the industry has fixed a public marker: net-zero by 2050, with near-term goals to fold more SAF into everyday operations. Delta, for example, is targeting 10 percent SAF usage by 2030, a sign of demand outpacing supply. The physics of flight will not be charmed by slogans, kerosene is still energy-dense, electric aircraft are far from scale, and hydrogen is not yet ready for prime time, so pragmatic steps like SAF matter.

Here is where camelina stands out. Unlike canola, winter camelina overwinters reliably in Minnesota, greening fields when they are usually bare, and opening yellow flowers early enough to feed bees before most crops wake up. Farmers piloting the system have learned they can harvest camelina “over the top” of emerging soybeans, then carry the soy to fall, two harvests, one field, a steadier cash flow. In agronomic terms, it is relay-cropping; in Benedictine terms, it is stewardship.

For aviation, the math grows compelling. Depending on the pathway and feedstock, SAF can cut life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions by as much as ~94 percent compared with conventional jet fuel—crucially, not by eliminating tailpipe CO₂ (jets still emit when they burn fuel) but by shrinking the full cradle-to-takeoff footprint. That nuance matters in an era allergic to half-truths: SAF is not a silver bullet, but it is a material step we can scale now.

Ott’s route to this work reads like a quiet apprenticeship in resilience. In Cobán and in Santiago, he learned the cadence of service that doesn’t billboard itself, show up, learn the language of place, pay attention to people, and then keep showing up. Research demands the same temperament: year after year of trials, a tolerance for failure, a preference for patient gains over clever shortcuts. On camera this spring, standing among flowers alive with bees, Ott explained camelina to a WCCO reporter with the same unhurried clarity he once brought to classrooms and parish halls: It’s an ancient crop; it makes oil; and unlike canola, it survives our winters. That survival trait is the hinge on which the whole system turns.

There is, of course, the hard part: scale. SAF today is a thimble against a lake; costs are high, supply chains immature, and offtake agreements are still outpacing production. Even optimistic analysts concede we’re early in the build-out, and the industry must thread policy, markets, and agronomy without drifting into greenwish. Yet, as federal and private capital seeds new facilities and feedstocks diversify, the runway is lengthening. Minnesota is positioned to lead precisely because its researchers and farmers are tackling the agronomy in the cold, messy middle, where ideas either earn their keep or wither. Reuters

Camelina’s broader benefits help the case pencil out beyond the refinery gate. Covering soil through snowmelt reduces nutrient loss and keeps water cleaner downstream; early flowers support pollinators; and relay-cropping can add a marketable harvest without stealing summer from soybeans. Ott’s team is turning those field-level virtues into a farmer-ready playbook: seeding dates and row spacing, harvest windows, yield trade-offs, and the gritty “how” that separates promising from practical.

What does all this mean for the rest of us, for BVC alumni, for travelers, for anyone who likes their sky without a moral asterisk? It means the future of flight will likely be grown, at least in part, and that the work of growing it looks a lot like service: local, iterative, unbeautiful at times, and motivated by care for a common home. It means the years Matthew Ott spent listening and learning in Guatemala and Chile were not an intermission before “real life,” but a training ground for the vocation he lives now, turning fields into fuel for a planet that needs both.

And it means this: the next time you step onto a plane, you may be riding on the faith that small seeds, diligently tended in Minnesota, can carry a very large weight.

The first time Max Krause saw Montserrat, he was in the back of a taxi, watching a serrated skyline swell into a mountain. The Benedictine monastery appeared like something chiselled out of legend. “I knew immediately that was a place I would like to spend time,” he says.

Krause arrived as a Benedictine Volunteer Corps member in 2022, drawn by an academic detour that became a calling. A Hispanic Studies capstone on Catalan politics had led him to a monastery that stands at the cultural heart of Catalonia. He read for months about the region’s language, history, and identity, then he lived inside it. The novelty faded, but the belonging did not.

“What kept me there was the community,” he says. “They did not just welcome me. They opened every door, and gave me a home away from home.”

From volunteer to colleague

The shift from BVC volunteer to staff colleague changed the terms of relationship. Volunteers are loved, Max notes, yet everyone knows they will leave in a year. When he returned, he was no longer a guest passing through. He felt treated like family. The doors opened wider. Trust deepened. He saw more of the monastery’s inner life and carried more responsibility for its work.

That work has been significant. Montserrat is marking a thousand years of monastic life, and Krause serves on the team directing the millennium celebration. The opening, he recalls, was a study in scale and symbolism. “We filled the Basilica with eight or nine hundred people,” he says, an audience that included political and business leaders, and above them, the abbots and priors of the Subiaco Cassinese Benedictine family. Seating charts took hours. Protocol mattered. Then the procession began.

“When you see the cardinal of Barcelona walking beside the Abbot of Montserrat, when the abbots are in the upper choir and all eyes meet at the center, you feel the weight of a thousand years, and the beginning of the next thousand,” he says. A staged dialogue set the tone, with voices of Montserrat’s founding abbot and a future abbot in the year 3025. The message was simple. This is not a closing. This is a continuation.

Belonging, learned in a language

If service gave Krause roots, language gave him a home. He speaks in Catalan every day, which he learned by choice rather than requirement. “The Abbott told me the other week, you are barely American anymore,” he says, laughing about the English words that now escape him. The joke carries a truth. Language is a shared life, not a skill on a resume.

Catalan has about ten million speakers, mostly in Catalonia. It is fiercely loved, and often overlooked. New arrivals typically learn Spanish first, which is practical and expected, but it means Catalan competes for oxygen. Krause understands that tension, and he meets it with respect. He orders coffee in Catalan, and watches faces light up. “People are shocked,” he says. “It shows them I value the place they love.”

That posture is Benedictine at its core. Pay attention. Honor the particular. Let hospitality be mutual. “We came to your house,” Max says of his BVC year. “We were not going to treat it like an Airbnb.”

The work behind the worship

Krause’s days are long, and the holy mountain is also a workplace. He plans Monday through Friday, then executes on weekends, when most of the major events occur. “I work pretty much seven days a week,” he says. He wants to be at prayer more often, and sometimes he is, but he is not a monk. “If there is a meeting in the middle of Mass, I go to the meeting. That is the job,” he says without complaint. It is the rhythm of service, ora and labora recalibrated for a lay role inside a living monastery.

A thousand years forward

If you want to glimpse Montserrat’s reach, stand in the square on April 27, when the image of the Mare de Déu, the Black Madonna, is carried in procession. This year, five thousand people filled every corner. Hikers leaned over railings to watch the Mass below. “People were sobbing,” Max says. “You see that Montserrat is more than a place. It is a spiritual bond, a generational connection, almost a national hymn made visible.”

What he hopes for the next decade is both practical and bold. He wants Montserrat to be a focal point for Catalan language, culture, and faith. He wants schoolchildren learning Catalan there, and young people learning to pray there. He wants fewer selfies, more returns. “Tourism brings money and awareness,” he says, “but it is not a long-term plan. You maintain a thousand years through belonging, not passerby traffic.”

What BVC makes possible

Krause is clear about what BVC gave him. “Without BVC, you do not get to live a year inside a Benedictine monastery,” he says. It formed his spiritual rhythm, taught him names and faces, and built the muscle of showing up. It also left one deliberate gap that he chose to bridge. He learned Catalan because he wanted to belong, and because belonging carries responsibility. “If I had not learned Catalan, I never would have been offered this job,” he says. His advice to future volunteers is straightforward. Go to the place. Learn the language. Let hospitality cut both ways.

The mountain that first appeared in a taxi window is now a life. It is work, prayer, and a thousand-year story he is helping to carry forward. He has become, as friends tease him, “more Catalan than American.” He smiles at that, then returns to the next seating plan, the next rehearsal, the next procession that points both backward and ahead. “We are not closing anything,” he says. “We are starting the next chapter.”

BVC Pathways: Service into Vocation

Max is not alone. This summer, Elijah Browne, BVC 2024–2025 in Newark, New Jersey, accepted a full-time role as a teacher and IT instructor at Saint Benedict’s Prep. Sean Fisher, a 2023 graduate and volunteer in Imiliwaha, Tanzania and Montserrat, Spain, has accepted a role in the school at Montserrat and will begin working soon. Across our network, more alumni are moving from a year of service into long-term leadership at their sites, turning presence into permanence.