Holy Cross Monastery

Holy Cross Monastery is a community of Episcopal Benedictine monks in the beautiful Hudson Valley.

Our guesthouse ministry is our community's primary ministry. We welcome around 3,000 guests each year on individual, directed, and group retreats.

We are a monastic guesthouse. The quiet and openness that our guests so value arise out of the balanced life of the monastic community, grounded in a rhythm of regular worship and a commitment to lifelong conversion to the monastic way of life as expressed in the Rules of St. Benedict and our founder, James Huntington. We strive to live faithful lives of integrity, hospitality, generosity, mercy, and open-heartedness. We hear regularly from our guests that those are the same qualities that they seek in their times of retreat, and we believe that that they find them here because we are engaged in that search ourselves.

Our guesthouse ministry is the natural extension of the life that we live as Christian monastics. We welcome all who seek rest, beauty, quiet, respite, and fellowship, from any faith or none at all. We find in the diversity of our guests a richness that both nourishes and challenges us—and both of those are good things!

Although we do not observe strict silence all the time, we do try to create an atmosphere that is conducive to prayer, quiet reflection, and the slow emergence of the inner life. As such, we offer much more silence than most people experience in their daily lives. Although silence does sometimes threaten our comfortable sense of ourselves in the world, through regular immersion in periods of silence, we have come to see it as a luxury, a gift, and a witness we can offer to a noisy world.