The Most Remarkable and Un-Bahamian of Monuments (Video)

Built by ‘Father Jerome,’ Stone by Stone, on the Islands’ Highest Peak

Peter Swanson Mar 26

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Cat Island’s greatest attraction is an attitudinal universe away from Nipper’s, Chat ’n’ Chill and all the other party-hearty hot spots throughout the Bahamas. Americans and our Canadian cousins have specific notions about tropical islands, and they usually don’t include religious asceticism.

The Hermitage, as it is called, is the crown atop Mount Alvernia at Cat Island, the highest peak in the Bahamas archipelago, though it rises a mere 206 feet above sea level. This one-man monastery was the work of its sole resident, a brilliant and eccentric Roman Catholic clergyman who called himself Father Jerome.

Anyone can visit The Hermitage, which is unlocked and unsupervised and may well be one of the greatest picnic spots on earth.

And yet it is way less visited than the party places that dot the island nation. Blame this maybe on a coincidence of cruising culture and geography. Beneath Alvernia is a decent beach anchorage, sheltered by the island from prevailing easterly winds, but not the storm winds that blow during winter frontal passages.

Yet winter is when foreign cruisers visit Bahamas the most, not because it’s the best time for visiting the Bahamas, but because it happens to be freezing cold around the Chesapeake and all those other northern places where these folks originate.

Not Flat, Not Scrubby

The waters of the Bahamas treat the human eye to swaths of color ranging from the darkest blue to aquamarine, and to something resembling Pinot Grigio near the place where sea gives way to sand. Beneath the water, coral reefs comprise entire lush worlds of stunningly beautiful, brightly colored sea life. For the most part, however, the land is flat, scrubby and unremarkable.

One man who brought beauty and proportion to the Bahamian landscape was our aformentioned eccentric priest.

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Father Jerome, who lived from 1876 to 1956, was a trained architect who designed and built many churches in the Bahamas. Three of them are whitewashed, one of which was designed in a style that could be described as Greco-Celtic with that Moorish influence so often found in old Mediterranean architecture.

That one is the twin-steepled church at Clarence Town on Long Island. From any slip at the Flying Fish Marina, you may behold its twin towers: This was the Roman Catholic church of the settlement. It hardly seemed to belong to the land with its ranch houses and metal commercial buildings. It was like a relic left behind by a retreating sea, as if the religion of mythological Atlantis shared the Catholic Jesus.

(Long Island, too, is rarely visited compared to the popular Exumas. In fact, George Town is often called “Chicken Harbor” because cruisers, having braved “northers” to get there, have exhausted the ambition needed to keep going.

Father Jerome had overseen the construction of another Clarence Town church years before his conversion to Romanism, when he was serving as an Anglican priest. The English brand of Christ worship must have seemed like a weak cup of tea to this deeply spiritual Englishman.

Arriving at Cat, cruisers are drawn to spending a long afternoon at the place where Father Jerome had created his personal masterpiece, the Hermitage. He had built himself a retirement home from thousands of stones, a one-man monastery that looks ancient, as if plucked from an Irish landscape. Indeed, the green and hilly landscape of Cat Island, as seen from Mount Alvernia, evokes pictures of Ireland, until the eye wanders far enough westward to take in the blue-green Bahamian shallows.

Successfully Serene

Past the gate at the foot of the hill, one must climb the same steep, rock-strewn front yard over which Father Jerome had manually hauled the rocks and mortar to the summit. “A proper church is no mere assembly hall, theatre, or auditorium for preaching and community singing, but it is first of all a place of sacrifice,” Monsignor John Cyril Hawes wrote years before assuming the name Father Jerome. “It should breathe forth an atmosphere of prayer of religious awe and supernatural mystery.”

Even in the Hermitage’s tiny chapel with its single pew, Father Jerome succeeded in that philosophy. A few yards away, his tiny sleeping quarters features his simple planked bed, no bigger than a ship’s berth. In the stone tower there still hangs a big bell, rusted now and silent.

Father Jerome had spent his career doing many things, including building churches and a cathedral in Australia, all of which are now considered national treasures there. His tenure Down Under had been anything but peaceful, however, as he toiled in and out of favor, depending on which bishop held sway.

Finally in 1939, he wanted out and badly enough to leave his respected position in Australia. He returned to the Bahamas of his Anglican youth. Father Jerome had been a sailor, and here on Cat he built himself the Hermitage like other men might build a boat, and he anchored his soul to a hill beneath the undiluted stars.

Only the anchor dragged. The plan failed.

Until the End

Father Jerome became a celebrity. His skills were in great demand, and so he went back to work building churches, a convent, a monastery, and a boy’s college—all for the Bahamians. Summarizing one biographer: Father Jerome worked himself to death. And he did not die in his monk’s bed but across the water at a Catholic Hospital in Miami. He was buried, as per his request, barefoot and without a coffin in a cave on the hillside just beneath his one-man monastery.

The Hermitage is open 24/7. No admission is charged. No one tends the property. Bring your dogs. Bring a picnic. Bring a bottle of wine. For a calm anchorage come in April, May or June. Unless the cruising culture changes, you will likely drink alone atop Alvernia…and in peace.