BY GRETCHEN KEISER

Near the thirteenth of the month, off-duty sheriff’s deputies are needed to direct the traffic pulling in and out of the bookstore’s parking lots. And many days the monk ringing up the items at the cash register is the abbot.

For nearly one year the Trappist Community of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers has handled the ups and downs of an expended industry in its midst, the Abbey Store.

In August 1993 fulfilling the decisions voted favorably upon by the by the community’s solemn professed monks, a new store was built and opened near the entrance to the monastery off pastoral Highway 212 in Rockdale County. The old bookstore area, four times msmaller, reverted to other monastic uses.

Part of the reason was the impact of huge crowds arriving monthly to visit a reported Marian apparition site in another section of Rockdale. Busloads of visitors simultaneously discovered the Mary-titled monastery, its liturgy and abbey church, and its small shop of Catholic books, statues and devotional items. Crowd-control lines had to be set up. But the abbot, Dom Bernard Johnson, OCSO, said the community was already contemplating a possible expansion of the store because industries once used to support the monks and keep them self-sufficient were declining. Their hay industry, for one example, was phased out in 1993.

The store, on the other hand, has been improving over the last decade, the abbot said, and “has proven itself as a source of income for the monastery.”

Brother Ken, OCSO, who managed the shop in its smaller location and has welcomed the opportunity to expand and improve, notes that it is much more spacious and comfortable, with a shaded porch, decked with hanging baskets, windows that let in views of the monastic fields, and room to browse.

The space has permitted him to devote a larger area to food and other products from Trappist communities of the men and women in the United States, including cheese, fruit cakes, fudge and candy, jellies and jams and the bread baked at the Conyers monastery.

Religious articles, ranging from statues of Mary and the saints, to scapulars, rosaries, medals, holy cards, crosses, sand-castings, greeting cards, posters and artwork, are the most sought-after items in the Abbey Store, Brother Ken said. Pilgrims visiting from neighboring states regularly deplete the Abbey Store of its stock of such religious goods, so it is constantly having to replenish supplies.

In the book department of the store, Father Tom Francis, OCSO, says that he is able to offer over 1,000 religious book titles. Among the emphases in the store are books on prayer, devotional works including missals and the liturgy of the hours, monastic and contemplative classics, Marian literature, and accounts of visionaries whether in this century or from the past.

Reflecting the interests and needs of its shoppers, the store has a section devoted to books in Spanish, and has given over more space to videos and audiocassettes, Father Tom Francis said.

He comments candidly that the book and tape sales reflect a hunger for devotional material and Marian prayer books and a down-turn in interest in such hugely popular writers in the 1970s and 1980s as Henri Nouwen and George Maloney. Still the classics in mysticism by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross rarely remain on the shelves for long.

Father Tom Francis, who has ordered 500 copies, expects the English Catechism of the Catholic Church to be the publishing event of the year for the church, but regrets that Catholics are not purchasing more Bibles and scriptural studies.

Dom Johnson, who is among the monks regularly working in the store, particularly on its busiest and most demanding days, said the sore is “an apostolate” as well as an industry.

The pilgrims to Rockdale County range from “the poorest of the poor” to the rich, he said.

“They are buying what pilgrims buy and we are offering what pilgrims buy.”

The Abbey Store, like the rest of the monastery, exercises a ministry of hospitality, graciously receiving those who come and absorbing the changes.

“I have nothing but admiration for my monks and the way they have handled an extraordinary event in their lives,” the abbot once commented.

Whether Catholic crowds will always appear in Rockdale County, the monastic community of Trappists, currently marking its golden jubilee year, will always be an attraction to all manner of visitors.

(The Abbey Store is open from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday.)