Brother Benno’s celebrates 90th birthday of longtime spiritual leader

In the dining room of The Brother Benno Center, a refuge for the area’s poor and homeless, more than 100 people gathered recently to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Rev. Charles Wright, who has been a spiritual guide there for four decades.

Wright has been involved with Brother Benno’s since Harold and Kay Kutler opened it as a soup kitchen in 1983 in a cottage on Minnesota Avenue in Oceanside. The couple was inspired to help people by the late Rev. Benno Garrity, a Benedictine monk with Wright at the Prince of Peace Abbey in Oceanside. The two monks often drove around the neighborhoods in a little old truck to bring the bread Garrity baked to people in need. The bread also went to abbey visitors and local businesses who in turn made donations to Garrity’s causes.

The nonprofit, named after Garrity, now includes seven recovery homes. People in the program work alongside volunteers to help run the operation, which includes providing food, clothing, showers and services for hundreds of homeless folks, seniors and working families on the brink of homelessness. The place is like home to many who got help turning their lives around.

Wright has been the nonprofit’s spiritual leader through it all. He served on the Foundation Board from the start and is still a board member. He leads retreats and meetings for the board and staff. He was also the honorary Brother Benno’s chaplain. He offers words of encouragement and peace and a prayer at board meetings and sometimes drops by the dining room and shares a few jokes with people gathered there for breakfast.

“Father Charles has been the Foundation’s spiritual compass since its inception,” said Paul “Mac” McNamara, Brother Benno’s executive director.

Wright, like many others, was inspired by Garrity.

They both came to Prince of Peace Abbey in 1961 and both had been at St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana, the founding monastery of St. Charles Priory, which later became Prince of Peace Abbey. They and a handful of other monks shared life at the monastery on Benet Hill Rd. They were friends until Garrity’s death in 1992.

Garrity, who served as chief cook at St. Meinrad, kept that post at Prince of Peace. He made gallons of chili and beans and food to take out to the fields to feed local workers. Wright helped him and drove him on his nightly runs to pick up what food the markets would give and what furniture and clothing he could find to distribute in the barrios around Oceanside..”Br. Benno’s charitable side is well known but his religious side was also an inspiration that influenced me and so many others. At times he would ask–pressure–me to go out to the fields and celebrate Mass for the workers. He would bring–lure-many to the confessional,” Wright said. “Whenever there was a sick person who needed ministering at home or a visit in the hospital Br. Benno would volunteer for me. Of course I needed no prompting.  That ministry still drives me.  So Brother’s inspiration is still having a deep effect.”

In 1983, the same year that the Kutlers opened the soup kitchen, St. Charles Priory blossomed into an abbey and changed its name to Prince of Peace. Wright was assigned the role of prior, the position just below the abbot, and was responsible for much of the operation of the abbey. In 1994, he was elected abbot and served in that role until he resigned 10 years ago.

Wright first visited Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine order, in 1961 after hearing about it as a prelaw student at San Diego State University where he was involved with the Catholic Campus Ministry at the Newman Center. The idea of joining an religious order came from a base chaplain while he was serving in the Army in Germany from 1957-59. Wright would join the chaplain in regular prayer and religious services and encourage other soldiers to join.

“I found great peace in times of private prayer and would seek times and places where I could be alone always with the Lord. Many times, that was in the chapel, which was deserted most of the day,” Wright said.

It was that peace that Wright wanted to share with others. After visiting six other religious orders over several years, Wright liked the Benedictines with their motto of ‘Ora et Labora,’ that is, ‘work and pray.’

Even though at first he had not intended to go into the priesthood, he studied at the seminary at St. Meinrad Archabbey for two years, where he was immersed in Latin and New Testament Greek.

Wright returned to the monastery in Oceanside to begin the official formation program of a Benedictine monk. His novitiate was from 1963 to 1964, when Wright pronounced his vows of Obedience, Fidelity and Stability, which meant he was joining the monastery and Benedictine order for life. He completed his studies for the priesthood at Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon and was ordained to the sacred priesthood in 1970.

“I felt called to join a religious order that had a deep life of prayer but also had the option of putting into practice what was in the heart,” Wright said.

At Brother Benno’s, he’s known for sharing that prayer life and his sense of humor.

“In opening prayers at meetings and in events at Brother Benno’s, Father Charles often reminds us that God has made each person with a basic need to help other people. He stresses it is in our very nature to help and give to other people, which far outweighs anything we may receive,” said Joe McDevitt, vice-chairperson of the Brother Benno Foundation

“We see in Father Charles his love, kindness, and compassion for each person which encourages our staff and volunteers, including board members, to follow his lead.  Father Charles keeps us close to our mission to uplift the dignity of those we serve,” McDevitt said.