Coverage of La Trappe closing

Rancé was not the founder of La Trappe or the Trappist Order

Most of the sources call Rancé the founder of the Trappist movement, students of Cistercian history know that  from the early 1600s, the abbots Denis Largentier (Clairvaux) and Octave Arnolfini (Châtillon) where at the beginning of the movement. Another trope is that the monks of the Common Observance were so depraved in the seventeenth century that God himself called the Strict Observance into being. Actually, the 1600s showed the movement to be flourishing in many, if not all, abbeys. Another error is the claim that La Trappe had survived for "over 900 years," but it was closed and roundly abused in the French Revolution, as were all abbeys, and was a romantic re-foundation of the nineteenth century. 
Pointing to these errors may be nitpicking. Other authors point to the predicted closure of La Trappe as a sign of a far graver matter: "That this venerable monastery cannot find enough vocations to keep it alive is," so writes Bishop Robert Barron, "a sign of the spiritual disaster that has befallen Europe in the last hundred years." And that is much more tragic.