By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Monastery films are divine. The last four I’ve watched are especially memorable.
Three of those films are about Holy Trinity Abbey, the now closed Trappist monastery in rural Huntsville, Utah, which was my boyhood home away from home. (I tell that story in my 2021 book Monastery Mornings.)
The other is a brand new documentary about an abbey for women near Tucson which the Utah monks helped support and which my wife and I visited in late 2023.
My friend Steve Peterson, a Salt Lake City artist, created the oldest member of this fine cinematic quartet. While attending film school at the University of Utah in the mid-1980s, Steve produced a vintage black and white documentary called Monastery.
Steve showed his film to groups at the University. He also organized a very unique screening at the Blue Mouse, Salt Lake City’s famous (but now closed) alternative movie house. (You can read more about this very cool event here.)
Over three decades later, Steve generously showed his film again during the 2022 celebration of the Utah abbey’s 75th anniversary. Although he is an active Latter-day Saint, Steve has said he admires the monks’ devotion and he hoped to capture its essence on film.
He succeeded. I also like his film because it illustrates the monastery during its prime years and shows the monks largely as I knew them when I was young.
Ironically, the last person who joined and stayed at the Huntsville monastery as a monk arrived there just after Steve finished his film. Because it could not attract and keep new members thereafter, Holy Trinity had to close in 2017.
A 2018 movie by documentary film maker John Slattery shows the abbey during these years of slow decline. John attended Weber State University in Ogden and now lives and works in California.
During his many visits to Huntsville over 15 years beginning in 2002, John filmed Present Time: Journal of a Country Monastery. A trailer is available here.
When interviewed about his project, John told the Weber State student newspaper, “Making documentaries allows you to insert yourself into people’s homes and lives. It’s work that offers unique intimacy into new worlds.”
John’s film achieves that intimacy. It feels like a deep existential dive into the sights and sounds, as well as the people and places, of the old abbey as it gently and peacefully withers away.
A third film, produced by Salt Lake City public radio station KUER, is a brief glimpse into the final moments of the Utah monastery. To Close A Monastery follows the monks as they pack their bags, lock the doors of the old abbey, and leave their home for the final time.
In 2022, we screened the KUER film at the monastery’s 75th birthday party celebration, right after Steve Peterson showed his film from the 1980s. The juxtaposition of monastic past and present was a stark cinematic contrast.
Few people were closer to the Utah monks than the Trappist sisters of Santa Rita Abbey in the mountains of Sonoita near Tucson, Arizona. Unfortunately, they now face challenges similar to those of their Utah brothers.
The Huntsville monks helped their Trappist sisters with finances, irrigation, business matters, and even served as their chaplains. In turn, the sisters often visited Utah for retreats and to check in on their older Huntsville brothers.
And now Arizona filmmaker Vicky Westover has given the Santa Rita sisters their own touching documentary called Final Vows. Westover and her colleagues spent four years filming at the Arizona abbey.
The film’s plot line follows the story of Sister Hildegard (a native of Kenya) and Sister Sharon (from Texas) as they make their final and first vows, respectively, at the monastery. But Final Vows is also about so much more.
The debut of Westover’s film coincides with a remarkable but turbulent time for the abbey. Santa Rita joyously celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023.
Yet, with just a handful of sisters left there, Santa Rita now faces the same existential questions as did the Utah monastery. In 2024 alone, three of the sisters passed away, two of them on the same day.
Moreover, the abbey’s leader Sister Vicki Murray is, as noted on the Final Vows website, “a life-sustaining presence” who may be “required to step down soon when she turns 75 years old.”
As a result, Arizona public radio station AZPM describes the film as a “documentary on aging, caring and faith.” It’s also about the grace and joy the Santa Rita sisters show as they face these difficult circumstances.
We streamed/watched Final Vows during its worldwide premiere in February 2024 at the 21st annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Montana. Some two thousand films applied for the festival but only 150 were accepted.
During an interview in the film, Sister Vicki—who we met once in Utah when she visited the Huntsville monks—delightfully recounts how she helped start the abbey a half century ago while just in her twenties.
Lovely scenes of her calling and feeding (by hand!) some of the abbey’s local deer population reminded me of when St. Francis of Assisi preached to the birds. We saw those deer when my wife and I visited Santa Rita in December 2023, but they watched us warily and kept a safe distance.
During that same visit, we also met Sister Pam Fletcher. She amused us with the story of how she had just fixed one of the abbey’s machines for making altar bread. She had to get instructions over the phone in French from the European manufacturer with a step by step translation into English by another sister. (Read more about our here.)
Thus, I was not surprised to see in Final Vows various scenes of Sister Pam athletically cleaning the abbey windows and scaling the monastery roof to check on the abbey’s bell tower. Few people better reflect the monastic life motto of ora et labora—prayer and work—than Sister Pam.
Wonderfully, producer/director Westover also was able to show Final Vows to an overflow crowd at the Fox Tucson Theatre on Sunday, September 8, 2024. A question and answer panel followed with the director, Sister Pam, and Sister Vicki.
This excellent quartet of monastery films by Steve Peterson, John Slattery, KUER, and Vicky Westover, may soon become a quintet. Since the time the Utah monastery closed, a much more seasoned Steve Peterson has continued to follow and interview the surviving Huntsville monks as they lived in a Salt Lake City retirement home.
Right now he’s working on a new film, tentatively called “PRAYERS with BREAD & HONEY,” which will chronicle Steve’s monastic encounters at two very different stages of his life. When it’s done, I think we may have enough monastic documentaries to hold our very own film festival.
A Trappist monastery film festival? Hmmm, now there’s a divine idea.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
Sounds intriguing.