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.
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 Catholic.
Following the establishment of Caldey as a 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 5 July.
[4] The second, originally named the Community of the Holy Comforter, had been an active Anglican sisterhood founded in 1891, but adopted the enclosed Benedictine life under Carlyle's inspiration in 1906.
Lyne, meanwhile, never seems to have had much grip on Benedictine spirituality per se, preferring a more eclectic approach which for all its Catholic trappings was much more characterised by its creator's essential Evangelicalism and even Calvinism.
Anson, whose particular brand of Catholicism included beliefs in continual revelation and in the paranormal, later claimed that he had received a psychic communication from Carlyle at the moment of the former abbot's death in 1955.
[7] In the final analysis, the question of whether Carlyle could be considered either a religious mountebank or "gay icon" cannot be resolved, though the former evaluation seems unfair and even inaccurate.
[9] It should also be recognised that whilst Anson's biography of Carlyle indicates that expressions of filial affection between monks "sometimes took a form which would not be found in any normal monastery to-day (the) embraces, ceremonial and non-ceremonial, were regarded as symbolical of fraternal charity".
His indication that "Our variant of the Roman rite permitted a real hug and kisses on the cheek between the giver and the recipient of the Pax Domini at the conventual Mass" appears an honest statement of how things were, and cannot of itself be seen as indicating any departure from celibacy either on the part of Carlyle or of any other monk who was under vows at Caldey during the Anglican years (the reference here to the "Pax Domini" reflecting the use of the Tridentine Mass even before the Caldey Benedictine Order made its collective submission to Rome).