The 2026 General Chapter of the English Benedictine Congregation is set to take place at Kylemore Abbey in the scenic area of Connemara in County Galway, Ireland, from Monday 29 June – Thursday 9 July.
The Chapter at Kylemore Abbey will be the 100th General Chapter of the EBC. The General Chapter is held every four years and brings together superiors and delegates from the EBC communities around the world, along with the officials of the Congregation. The General Chapter is the governing body of the Congregation and the agenda at Kylemore Abbey will include the election of a new Abbot President. At the last General Chapter in 2022, Abbot Christopher Jamison was elected for a four-year term, which has now come to an end.
Kylemore Abbey is home to a Benedictine monastery of nuns founded in Ypres in 1665, who fled Belgium in World War One. In 1920 they settled in the grounds of Kylemore Castle. In 2022, the community was accepted into the English Benedictine Congregation along with two other new communities of nuns: Mariavall Abbey in Sweden and Jamberoo Abbey in Australia.
The houses of the English Benedictine Congregation are: the Community of St Gregory the Great (formerly at Downside Abbey); Ampleforth Abbey; Douai Abbey (Upper Woolhampton, Reading); Stanbrook Abbey; Belmont Abbey (Hereford); Ealing Abbey (London); Buckfast Abbey (Buckfastleigh, Devon); Washington Abbey (Washington DC, USA); Worth Abbey (Crawley, West Sussex); Portsmouth Abbey (Rhode Island, USA); St Louis Abbey (Saint Louis, USA); Kylemore Abbey (County Galway, Ireland); Jamberoo Abbey (Australia); and Mariavall Abbey (Sweden).
