Red Phoenix is a special skin balsam. In addition to caring for the skin and replenishing the skin’s lipid barrier, it also helps relieving muscle soreness and similar complaints by stimulating the blood circulation with pepper, ginger, arnica, St. John’s wort and the oil of wintergreen and fresh mint. It’s a unique recipe of the monks. The basis for the ointment is a mixture of pure bees wax and olive oil.

The abbey of St. Severin relocated in the spring of 2010, and the three religious have been living since then in the former German army radar school on the sunny (and sometimes cloudy) highland overlooking Kaufbeuren in the Bavarian Alps. They had vacated their previous quarters in Leinau when the property changed hands. The abbey monks belong to the ecumenical Port Royal Cistercian order. In the 17th century, the name stood for a pious movement related to Jansenism. Buffeted between fundamental ideas and a special conception of deeds on the one hand and the confessions on the other this spiritual bark never went under and was reestablished as a monastery in 1946. Perhaps it’s symbolic that the bark has found a new haven in a place under a radar installation where navigation training (with the aid of radar) took place. The monks earn their keep by giving spiritual instructions and by producing soap and other personal care products. This is a kind of work that is especially appropriate for monastic seclusion because it does without large-scale machinery and equipment while it requires concentration and a love of detail.