By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I’m not in the habit of making dramatic proclamations about divine intervention in the world.
I do believe, however, that six decades ago, God reached down from Heaven and blessed the Cistercian order when Brendan Freeman decided to become a Trappist monk and priest.
I first met Father Brendan several years ago when he was helping my friends—the Utah Trappist monks—close their Huntsville monastery. I grew up at the Northern Utah abbey, a tale described in my 2021 book Monastery Mornings.
Brendan was a gentle guiding light for these wonderful old men navigating one of the most difficult moments of their lives.
Now Brendan is now facing his own transition, at age 86, as he retires from his final leadership post at New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque, Iowa. He’s been one of the most remarkable leaders in American monastic history.
The son of Irish immigrants and the nephew of two Benedictine monks, Father Brendan joined New Melleray in 1958 at age 20. Irish monks from Mount Melleray Abbey near Waterford, Ireland started the stone monastery over a century earlier in 1849.
According to old newspaper accounts, his St. Louis schoolmates and friends recall John Brendan Freeman as a regular guy, just like them. The Iowa monastery leaders, however, saw something special in the young monk.
Brendan finished his priesthood studies in Iowa and was ordained at the abbey in 1969. By 1973, he also had earned a master’s degree in liturgical studies from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. and assumed various leadership roles at his monastery.
Then in 1984, at age 45, his fellow Trappists elected Father Brendan as the next abbot of New Melleray Abbey. He held the top job for the next three decades, during some of the most challenging times the monks ever faced.
Chapter 2 of St. Benedict’s rule for monasteries says an abbot “must know what a difficult and demanding burden he has undertaken: directing souls and serving a variety of temperaments, coaxing, reproving and encouraging them as appropriate.” Father Brendan proved adept at all aspects of the challenging job.
Among other things, in 1999 Brendan led the monks’ difficult transition away from agricultural work. With fewer and fewer monks joining the abbey, the monastery did not have the raw labor necessary for a successful and sustainable farm.
So, partnering with a local farmer, Brendan and the Iowa monks started the now famous and beloved Trappist Caskets company. The abbey’s website notes that each of these sacred vessels, built from sustainable sources, is “crafted in the rural quiet of the monastery, by hands accustomed to prayer.”
An Iowa monk blesses every casket/urn and signs a card for the grieving friends and family. For each person buried in a Trappist casket or urn, the monks plant and consecrate a tree in the abbey’s forest. Every year the monks remember all their “customers” in a memorial mass.
This unique business decision garnered national attention, including a 2001 article in The New York Times. Smithsonian Magazine ran a story about Trappist Caskets and the Iowa monks in 2002.
Trappist Caskets has done so well that in 2009, The Irish Times named Father Brendan as one of the top 100 Irish-American business people. And then in 2010, Irish America magazine put Father Brendan on its annual Business 100 list, a “celebration of the best and the brightest Irish-American executives and their standout achievements in the corporate world.”
Brendan also has been a loving shepherd, a thoughtful scholar, and a kind teacher. His many homilies and talks to his monks from over the years are collected in his wonderful 2010 book Come and See—the Monastic Way for Today.
His insights help those of us outside the monastery forge our way too.
For example, his thoughts on how someone becomes a good monk resonate beyond the cloister walls as a useful formula for being a good person. He writes, “The first step is learning to have compassion for yourself. The second step is learning to have compassion for others.”
I also love his advice for being less judgmental. He first quotes St. Augustine: “Men are strange creatures, the less they focus on their own sins the more they focus on the sins of others.”
Father Brendan then explains: “There must be hundreds of Desert Fathers’ sayings that forbid us to judge our brother. The best way to do this is not by making a firm resolution not to so act, as if willpower alone could achieve this. The best way to keep from this vice of judging others harshly is to be acutely aware of our own failings and sins. Hold them like a sack in front of our face, not like a sack slung against our back. On our back, we might forget they are there. In front of our eyes, we cannot forget them.”
Brendan understands the end-times too.
In 2017, he wrote in Cistercian Studies Quarterly about the final days of the Utah abbey. He concluded, “It comes down to this: no matter where we are on this earth we have no permanent dwelling. Our true homeland is not here: our true monastery is not a building or a visible place. It is in the heart—a space that can never be diminished or demolished. It is eternal and everlasting as the heavens.”
After living at Utah’s Holy Trinity Abbey from 2013 to 2017, Brendan moved to New Mellifont Abbey in County Louth, Ireland. For several years, he worked with the Irish Trappist monasteries, helping them try to discern a path forward.
Brendan encouraged the Trappist Irish communities of Mount Melleray Abbey, Mount Saint Joseph Abbey, and Mellifont Abbey to join their three dwindling communities. In November 2024, the Irish monks voted to do just that, and the new combined abbey will be called Our Lady of Silence.
Back in the United States, the Iowa monastery’s website proclaims, “Now into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Irish heritage of friendliness and openness is still alive at New Melleray.” Few people display that Irish Trappist hospitality better than Father Brendan.
I’ve enjoyed two visits to his abbey with family or friends, one in November 2024 just before he retired. Both times, Father Brendan was full of infectious joy.
He gave us tours of the abbey and surrounding town, introduced us to his many Iowa friends (where we enjoyed a wee bit of afternoon whiskey), and took us to meet the wonderful Trappist women living at his nearby sister monastery, Our Lady of the Mississippi.
Because of his many leadership roles in the Cistercian order, as well as his engaging personality, Brendan has friends all over the country, and all over the world. One of them is even a countess. I expect many of them will come visit him during his retirement.
Trappist monks like Father Brendan never really retire, of course. After sixty-plus years of devoted service in leadership, however, Brendan finally gets to do what he really hoped to do when he first joined the Iowa monastery in 1958.
During my last visit to Iowa, he told me he’d always wanted to be the simple monk who climbs off his rustic tractor, walks through the flaxen fields into the beautiful stone New Melleray chapel, and chants with his brothers.
If ever there was an 86-year-old monk who can manage to live that kind of life at a monastery that ended all farming operations over a quarter century ago, it’s going to be Brendan Freeman.
And after all the grace and love he’s brought to his order and pretty much everyone he knows, I hope that God blesses him abundantly while he tries.
*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.
