Confidence Restored

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

The last five years have been challenging for the Trappist monks who used to live at Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah. Their monastery closed, they had to relocate, and three of their brothers—as the Trappists like to say—graduated to Heaven. Yet, moods were light and spirits lively on the recent summer morning when they returned to the old monastery site and rededicated the lovely white statue of Mary that graces the small quaint cemetery still there.

The Utah monastery bought the statue in 1950 from another Trappist monastery in France. The sculptor’s name was Louis Richomme, known as Father Marie-Bernard (1883 to 1975), an artistic ironworker who entered the Abbey of La Trappe de Soligny in 1907 at age twenty-four.

La Trappe is one of the most important of the world-wide Cistercian abbeys. Its abbot in the year 1662—Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé (godson of Cardinal Richelieu)—led a thorough reform of the Cistercian Order. Thereafter, the movement adopted the name of the abbey, and now we have “Trappist” monks.

La Trappe Abbey was suppressed during the French Revolution, but restored and re-consecrated in 1832. French kings Charles X (the last Bourbon monarch) and Louis Philippe (the last French king) took retreats there. The monastery was entirely rebuilt again in 1895.

Father Marie-Bernard worked as the handyman at the famous monastery, but also was an artist and sculptor. Just after World War I, at the request of the nearby Carmelite nuns from the convent at Lisieux, he produced statues of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, known in Catholic circles as “the Little Flower.” One of his statues, showing Thérèse covering her crucifix with roses, is very well known and was reproduced over 200,000 times and sent throughout the world.

A biographer has said that Father Marie-Bernard was known in his monastery as the “teacher of joy,” because he advocated the “spirituality of smiling.” He liked to say, “Joy is the veneer of love: a singing soul is a soul enchanted with God.” In 1940, Father Marie-Bernard sculpted and sent a new image of Mary to a neighboring Trappist abbey caught in the middle of the emerging World War II.

He hoped it would protect his fellow monks, and so he called the new image of “Our Lady of Confidence.” After the June 1944 Allied landings in Normandy, Father Marie-Bernard’s own Abbey of La Trappe also was in the middle of the combat zone. The monks there prayed for protection and promised to raise a statue of Our Lady of Confidence on the hill above the monastery if they emerged unscathed from the turmoil. It worked.

A military hospital for the wounded replaced the Nazi SS regiment that had occupied La Trappe earlier in 1944. The Germans painted red crosses on the roofs of the monastery buildings, saving them from Allied bombardments. No stone in the abbey suffered any damage.

True to their word, in October 1947, the Trappist monks erected the large sculpture that still can be seen today by visitors—the “Statue de Notre-Dame de la Confiance.” The statue, placed on a hill near La Trappe during the same year the Ogden Valley monastery started, will soon celebrate its 75th anniversary.

Utah’s smaller version of the famous image of Mary the protector is over 70 years. Before gracing the cemetery (in a lovely space designed by Huntsville artist Laurie Van Zandt), she stood first in the front of the monks’ Quonset hut church and then in their outdoor monastic courtyard.

After years of enduring all sorts of harsh weather, Our Lady of Confidence needed a cleaning and a facelift. Salt Lake City Catholic Deacon George Reade referred Bill White—who now owns and preserves the monastery land—to an art studio in Evanston, Wyoming, which agreed to do the delicate work.

Artists Catherine and Craig Holt restored and weatherproofed the historic statue and returned it to Bill in the Fall of 2020 (see: Evanston Couple Restores 70-year-old Mary statue). Bill waited for better weather, and for some relief from the COVID-19 pandemic, to invite the surviving Utah monks up to Huntsville for a rededication in June 2021. At the short ceremony, the last Huntsville abbot, Father David Altman, led prayers and blessed the statue.

Father David noted that statues remind us of “important individuals in the history of nations and peoples” and of “men and women outstanding in their fields.” He said we also need “role models at the spiritual-moral level of our lives” and that Mary is “superior” in this role. Father David explained, “Mary is the mother of Jesus, Jesus is our way to God, he is our salvation, therefore Mary is the mother of our salvation. Her role is that important, that essential in each of our journeys towards salvation.”

It was a bitter moment in some ways. All present knew—without doubt—that Father David and the other aging monks at the rededication ceremony someday will rest in that same peaceful little cemetery under the watchful eyes of that very statue.

And yet, the moment was sweet too, if for no reason other than the monks’ unshakable belief that when that someday finally arrives, life is changed not ended.

As a result, one other thing was abundantly clear too—the lovely and now restored statue of Mary, Our Lady of Confidence, in the quaint old monastery cemetery, has exactly the right name.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.