By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Beginning in the early 1970s, a now-closed Trappist monastery in rural Huntsville in Northern Utah was my home away from home. My 2021 book Monastery Mornings describes that unique Catholic boyhood among the monks and the Latter-day Saints.
I did not know the Utah monks, however, before the many significant changes in monastic life that occurred in the 1960s after Vatican II. Nor did I know them during the 1940s and 50s—perhaps the heyday of American monasticism—when growth and expansion led to the foundation of my beloved Abbey of the Holy Trinity in 1947.
Always curious about those mysterious parts of my old friends’ lives, I’d often do random word searches in online newspaper archives and related databases trying to learn more. That’s how I stumbled upon the fascinating stories of Colman McCarthy and Brother Joseph Szwedo.
Within a few years after Brother Joseph joined a monastery in 1944, some 2,000 men lived at Trappist abbeys in the United States. That number was declining when McCarthy left his monastery 20 years later in the mid-1960s. By the time Brother Joseph died in 2023, the number had dwindled to about 200 or less.
How did that happen and why?
The lives of these two men—a monk and former monk but neither one named Merton—perfectly illustrate the wild and fascinating journey of American monasticism since the middle of the twentieth century.
Colman McCarthy was born in 1938 on Long Island near New York City. Despite his devout Catholic upbringing, he has confessed, “I was a pretty wild kid in school.”
Thus, after finishing college McCarthy joined the Abbey of the Holy Spirit—a Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia—in the early 1960s. He stayed there for 5 years, and later told Irish America magazine these were the most important years of his life.
That’s probably because they pointed him in a completely different direction.
One day Catholic activist Dorothy Day visited the Georgia abbey and spoke to the monks. Her words inspired McCarthy to find ways to do social justice outside the monastery walls.
McCarthy started leaving the monastery grounds at night to deliver excess vegetables to poor families living nearby. During one such nocturnal after-hours excursion, a fellow monk caught him in the act.
McCarthy says the other monk used Trappist sign language and blew on his finger, suggesting McCarthy would burn in hell for this transgression of the rules. McCarthy was perplexed, “I’m feeding the hungry, but I’m going to spend eternity in hell. Something’s not quite right here. So I said, ‘Gee, I think I’m called to do other work.’”
The monastery leader agreed and contacted the editor of an Atlanta newspaper. The abbot said McCarthy wanted to be a writer, and asked the editor to meet with the soon-to-be-former monk.
The editor agreed, thereby launching McCarthy into a half century long career as a journalist, teacher, and peace activist.
In the late 1960s, fresh out of the Georgia monastery but still in his late twenties, McCarthy wrote and published several newspaper articles about the American Trappists. The headlines warned readers that he’d not written love letters to his former brothers.
One caption screamed: “Trappist Monks Defect to Join Activists” and “Dissent Replaces Jam-making.” Another noted: “Trappist Membership Dwindles.” And yet another, with a byline from McCarthy’s brother Denis, proclaimed there was a “Crisis in the Prayer Factories.”
McCarthy cited to the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis to help explain why he was criticizing a life he’d once lived. When Kazantzakis lived in a Sinai monastery, an old monk admonished him, “Return to the world. In this day and age, the world is the true monastery; that is where you will become a saint.”
McCarthy said his old order combined “the hairy-chestedness of the Marines, the heroics of the French Foreign Legion and the mystique of the Jesuits.” As a result, “[T]he American Trappists have always preferred to do hard things instead of good things.”
Yet, according to McCarthy, this brawny brand no longer worked. He noted, “[T]he Trappists, once the darlings of the pre-Vatican II church in America” were “in sharp decline in those entering and a sharper decline in those leaving…”
The former monk concluded, “[T]raditional monasticism is heading into hard weather.” Why?
McCarthy identified three reasons for the decline. The first reason was that “the seven-storey mountain” had been replaced by “the secular city” as “the address of God.”
McCarthy cited to Nazi dissident Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s admonition: “A Christian must plunge himself into the life of a godless world” rather than retreating from it. McCarthy said that a monastery “was where the action wasn’t.”
Second, McCarthy said many men were simply disenchanted with the monastic life as they knew it. Some criticized the bullying focus on rules and compliance. Others felt the Trappists had gone soft after Vatican II.
Finally, McCarthy asserted that a life of prayer and contemplation was not satisfying to Americans who, by nature, like to do things. He pointed out that many departing Trappists “jump into [more active ministries] where emotional satisfaction is great and the need to be needed continually met.”
McCarthy thought these factors also explained the restlessness of famous Kentucky monk Thomas Merton, as well as his withdrawal into a hermitage away from daily monastic life at Gethsemani Abbey.
Before publishing his first article, McCarthy wrote to Merton and asked for his assessment of the current state of monastic life. McCarthy has said that “in prose that ranged from angry venting to cautious analysis about ‘a real ferment’ in some monasteries, Merton held back little.”
Merton told McCarthy, “The term contemplative life is being used defensively as an excuse to keep monks in the monastery, to keep them out of contact with the problems and needs of the world, in short to keep them out of dialogue with the world. This is disastrous. Such a use of the term will bring complete discredit on the real value of contemplation. In a clumsy attempt to protect the monastic life, this negativism will only sterilize it and guarantee its demise.”
To his credit, McCarthy also has disclosed that Merton did not like his article, explaining:
“Not long after NCR ran my piece, Merton let his dislike be known. ‘Don’t take that article in the National Catholic Reporter too seriously by the way — if you saw it,’ he wrote to Sr. Elaine Bane on Dec. 21, 1967. ‘I mean the Colman McCarthy one. It is very slanted. I don’t think half these people really knew what they are talking about. He is another one who is completely hung up on the active-contemplative division, and who thinks that the way to solve it is to put all the weight on the ‘active.’ Utterly stupid.”
By 1969, McCarthy had distilled his existential question about monasteries down to “not whether we need contemplatives but where they should do their contemplating.”
He also answered the question himself: “Until now they have sought a hill, a pond, a tomb. But now contemplatives need to be in shops and towns, moving among men. Their prayer should be their personal goodness and their penance will be to stay sane despite everything.”
McCarthy went on to write for The New Yorker, The Nation, The Progressive, The Atlantic, Reader’s Digest, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Trappist monk Brother Joseph Szwedo also got his name in The New York Times, but for quite different reasons.
The 2018 Times article was about the decline of Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina. Brother Joseph’s story, however, really is the flip side of McCarthy’s life, and illustrates why some men stayed in monasteries even when thoughtful people like McCarthy left.
Born in Chicago in 1927, Brother Joseph joined Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey in 1944 at age 17, an era when monasteries were growing and expanding in the United States. A few years later, he agreed to go to Mepkin Abbey to help develop their farming program.
Mepkin is a Native American word that means “serene and lovely.” Henry Luce, the wealthy owner of Time and Life magazines, donated part of his vast Mepkin plantation—featuring ancient oaks and Spanish moss—to the Trappist monks in 1948.
Once Brother Joseph got there, he rarely left the abbey nestled on the banks of the Cooper River just outside of Charleston. Like McCarthy, Szwedo faced and resolved his own monastic vocational crisis.
A biographer explains that in 1966 the Trappists issued a decree of unification, saying, “There is to be only one class of religious in the Order. All are monks: monastic formation is given on the same lines, and rights and duties are to be the same.” It was only one of many significant changes for the Trappists.
For over 20 years, however, Brother Joseph had been a working lay brother with a different prayer life and a distinct charism from the monks who sang in the abbey choir. He’d worn a brown robe and brown scapular instead of the white robe and black scapular.
It hurt to see his beloved vocation tossed aside, almost like a business eliminates jobs when it conducts a reduction in force. Several of his fellow lay brothers resisted the change and left the Trappist order. Brother Joseph stayed and adapted.
For some seven decades until he died in 2023, Brother Joseph worked in the abbey’s fields and forests, beside its cattle and chickens, and put to great use his natural abilities as a mechanic, welder, and miller. His last abbot noted that Joseph had less “hairy-chested” talents too:
“Possessing a beautiful tenor voice, he sang with the monastic schola giving praise to God at all the liturgies. Devoted in honoring Mary, he was often making rosaries, some of which were sold in the monastery shop. As aging brought physical diminishment and he could no longer work on the farm, he continued to make rosaries even up to the week before his death….Daily he could be seen feeding the squirrels as he spoke with them in Polish which they obviously understood. Many monks and monastic guests learned from Brother Mary Jospeh to recognize the great number of species of birds that visit Mepkin seasonally, all looking for the food he so thoughtfully and caringly provided for God’s creatures.”
Paul Wilkes—Szwedo’s friend who writes for America magazine—noted, “For some observers, his might be considered a lesser vocation, but not for Brother Joseph. He relished every task he was given over the years, scrubbing pots in the refectory kitchen, working in the monastery sawmill, or grinding a precise amalgam of grain for the Mepkin chickens…He was completely present; he practiced a mindfulness that knew no season or fad.”
The monks I knew were a lot like McCarthy and Szwedo.
Monastery Mornings tells how a close friend left the Utah abbey when I was a boy. He went on to a very productive and rewarding life as a father and a grandfather and remained close friends with the monks, who even attended his funeral.
At the same time, other kind and gentle souls stayed behind at the Huntsville monastery. This includes a fighter pilot named Father Alan who loved to sing and irrigate the fields, a baseball fan named Father Patrick who loved people, and a cowboy philosopher named Brother Nicholas who made clocks for friends and family.
They all lived wonderful lives, as did Colman McCarthy and Brother Joseph Szwedo.
It makes me wonder if the “seven-storey mountain” and the “secular city” images that McCarthy juxtaposes in his 1960s articles critical of the Trappists creates a bit of a false dichotomy. In terms of spiritual geography, I think they really may not be that far apart from each other.
Perhaps as a result of evolution, the Trappist monasteries I’ve visited have never been—to use some words from McCarthy’s critique—places “where the action wasn’t.” And the monks I’ve known have never acted like they were beating a fast retreat from the world in which we all live.
My book Monastery Mornings is all about how cloistered Trappist monks helped a young boy—me—find his way in the world. Stories in the book show significant engagement by the Utah monks with the world, such as sending large amounts of money to the poor in India and to lepers in Molokai, and donating part of their land so the nearby mainly Latter-day Saint population of Huntsville could build a new water treatment plant.
One monk worked with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She later visited him in Huntsville and spoke to the monks in their chapter room. Dorothy Day stopped by the abbey when she was in Utah for the funeral of a fellow Catholic worker. Bede Griffiths came and told the monks all about his Benedictine ashram in South India.
Almost every time I give a book talk about Monastery Mornings, scores of people—including non-Catholics and even non-believers—come up to me and profess their love for the Utah monks. Many of them tell me, often with tears in their eyes, how a monk helped them in some important and endearing way.
There are similar stories from every other American monastery too.
For example, Brother Luke Armour from Gethsemani Abbey is actively involved in meeting and supporting trudgers from the recovery community. Father Brendan Freeman and the monks of New Melleray Abbey in Peosta, Iowa, give away their child and infant Trappist Caskets free of charge to families who need them.
Mepkin Abbey has built a meditation garden honoring the enslaved individuals who once lived and worked on the property, “marking a significant step towards truth-telling and reconciliation.” The Trappist monasteries for women regularly donate a significant part of their income—derived from making candy, communion wafers, and other things—to the poor.
As Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si, “[T]he ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion…Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”
Trappists have a very unique form of environmental concern. I like to call it monkservation. Many of the American monasteries have led the way on issues of environmental conservation and stewardship.
Dozens of readers who commented on the 2018 Mepkin Abbey New York Times story provided their own informal but interesting survey of the value of monasteries today. Among other things, readers said the world needs more silent places, more oases where we can stock up on spiritual energy, more exemplars of environmental stewardship, and more models of kindness, acceptance, and love.
It’s possible that today, the seven-storey mountain and the secular city might even be the very same place.
A little bit of the monastery lived within Colman McCarthy even twenty years after he left it behind. He penned a 1989 article in The Washington Post defending some Virginia Trappist monks who were trying to stop the construction of a noisy golf course in their backyard.
McCarthy wrote, “The United States has more than 12,000 golf courses but only 12 Trappist monasteries. [The monks have] a claim on silence and solitude as necessities to protect a way of life. If governments enforce laws to protect endangered species of animals, they ought to be even more watchful about some endangered seekers of God.”
In support of his argument, McCarthy cited Merton’s The Silent Life: “The silence of the forest, the peace of the morning wind moving the branches of the trees, the solitude and isolation of the house of God — these are good because it is in silence, and not in commotion, in solitude and not in crowds, that God best likes to reveal himself most intimately.”
Similarly, Brother Joseph did not leave the world behind when he joined his monastery. Paul Wilkes offers this lovely proof:
“My wife and two sons came to know Brother Joseph through our frequent trips to Mepkin over almost 30 years. He was always willing to break from the task at hand to talk, shattering the view that these were the omni-silent ones. My wife would greet him with a hug and kiss on the cheek and sometimes leave some fresh lipstick behind. Embarrassed, she was ready to wipe away the smudge and leave no trace of this innocent transgression. ‘Oh no, leave it,’ he would say, proud to be a marked man when he returned for the next round of prayers.”
(The National Catholic Reporter published a version of this article on August 17, 2025.)
*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. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
