By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Two Utah monks I knew from the old Huntsville monastery, Father Malachy Flaherty and Brother Nicholas Prinster, recently passed away and each was buried in a very simple, but beautiful, wooden casket. One of my other monk friends called them “Trappist caskets.” I was intrigued. I had heard of Trappist beers, but not caskets. I did a little research, and learned the backstory for these lovely boxes, made by monks but not just for monks.
The caskets, as well as urns and related containers, are made by the Cistercian (“Trappist”) monks of New Melleray Abbey, which is just outside of Dubuque, Iowa. The Abbey was founded on July 16, 1849─in the midst of the Potato Famine─by six Irish monks from Mount Melleray Abbey near Waterford, Ireland. For years, the Iowa monks supported themselves and their charitable works with a large farm and related agricultural operations. As the monks aged and their numbers dwindled, they conceived of casket manufacturing as an alternative way to earn a living.
The Trappist caskets are handcrafted by the monks, with support from a group of skilled laborers. They use wood (mainly black walnut, red oak, white oak, and cherry) from several groves on the Abbey grounds. The trees are managed, with an emphasis on organic sustainability, by a professional forester. Each completed casket is blessed by one of the Abbey’s monks. The Trappists regularly plant replacement trees, one for each person using a casket, and each such seedling is blessed too.
The New Melleray monks say a mass for each deceased person for whom their caskets are used. They keep a memorial book of inscribed names of these dearly departed in the monastery’s chapel, a limestone building furnished with red oak choir stalls. The monks even send handwritten condolence notes to the next of kin at the time of death and on the one year anniversary. (For more information on the caskets, see: https://trappistcaskets.com) (To learn more about New Melleray Abbey, see “One Thing” here: https://newmelleray.org/Videos#)
Trappist monk funerals are simple, stark and lovely. Often they use only simple wooden biers to cradle their beloved departed brother. Monks who have “graduated to Heaven” (as the Trappists like to say) are buried soon after death and in the white robes that they wore in life. Typically, monks are laid directly into the ground or in simple wooden boxes, very much unlike the elaborate (and expensive) equipment used for funerals elsewhere.
Famous Kentucky Cistercian monk and writer Thomas Merton once wrote, “It is not the burial of a monk…that is frightening; no, it is those embalmed corpses rouged up like wax-works and couched in satin cushions that terrify the heart and make even the smell of flowers horrible….” (Integrity: November 1947). Trappist caskets allow us non-monks to participate in the simplicity and beauty of a monastic burial, and perhaps to understand more fully, like the monks do, that when we die life is changed not ended.
