Memorial Day with Veteran Monks

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

The 2020 Memorial Day holiday—75 years after World War II ended—always was going to be rather memorable. It became simply unforgettable, however, when I filled in for some aging Trappists who, due to COVID-19 concerns, could not visit the final Utah resting place of their veteran brother monks.

Although the Huntsville monastery closed in 2017, the main reason we were able to cherish it for 70 years is World War II. In the days and years following that terrible global conflict, and spurred in part by Kentucky monk Thomas Merton’s 1948 autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, discharged WWII veterans poured into various American Cistercian monasteries.

One was Merton’s home, Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky. Merton wrote that when he first arrived there, Gethsemani was “seething with an energy and growth it had not known for ninety years.” Kentucky Abbot Frederic Dunne responded to the unexpected boom by founding several new monasteries. Merton noted, “By the time this [book] is printed, there will have been another Cistercian monastery in Utah.” (The Seven Storey Mountain, 498.)

Abbot Dunne sent 33 Kentucky monks to start the Utah monastery in 1947. One of them was my friend Brother Boniface Ptasienski, an Army translator from Brooklyn who joined the Trappist order right after he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and earned two bronze stars during the most intensive and climactic years of World War II. Other vets soon joined him, including a large, strong, and quiet California man called Brother Benedict. He was among the first to join the Utah Abbey. Formerly known as Charles Philip Bernard Castro, Brother Benedict came to Utah seeking peace after enduring six months of suffering in a German prisoner of war camp in Czechoslovakia.

The war guided men like Boniface and Benedict to monasteries for several reasons. Georgia Trappist monk Father Matthew Torpey explains, “You grow up pretty quick when people are dying around you and you might be the very next one. That’s what brought them in, looking for some kind of meaning and some kind of meaning for what they had just been through.” (See: “Men Choosing the Monastic Life, after World War II and Today,” YouTube video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VdMqgnsCAA). However, this may not have been the only reason for the post-war monastic boom. “It was more than just the horrors of war. Many of the soldiers experienced great comradeship, and after the futility of war they wanted to do something positive with their lives.” ( See: “Monks and their monasteries go into retreat as recruits dwindle,” Daily Telegraph article at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1515299/Monks-and-their-monasteries-go-into-retreat-as-recruits-dwindle.html).

Many men found this meaning and camaraderie in the foothills of rural Northern Utah. Father Brendan Hanratty was a World War II optician from Ireland who later served as the monks’ infirmary director. He was assigned to the Pacific forces in World War II. He saw fierce battles and, according to his hometown archives, was “so dismayed with the needless loss of life in that particularly bloody conflict that he immediately joined the Trappist Order.”

Father Jerome Siler, another founder of the Utah monastery and its longtime librarian, grew up in Philadelphia and served as an English Army chaplain during World War II. Brother Mark Stazinski, from Gary, Indiana, and Brother Nicholas Prinster from Grand Junction, Colorado, both served in the Navy during World War II. Nick was a cattle rancher. Mark was an accomplished carpenter and cook who stayed at the Utah abbey until his death in 2014. Brother Edward Eick from Corning, New York, served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945 and later as guest master at the Utah Abbey.

One Utah WWII veteran monk now buried elsewhere is Brother Cyril Anderson, from Omaha, Nebraska. During his senior year in high school he was drafted into the Marines and served in the Western Pacific. He was one of the few survivors of the Battle of Iwo Jima. At age 28 he joined the Utah Trappists, but in 2016 transferred to the monastery in Genesee, New York.

The Utah monastery graveyard even includes World War I and Korean War vets. Father Ivo Kilawee, from Brooklyn, was a theology professor and WWI vet, as was his colleague Father Denis Murphy, a former office boy for Thomas Edison and later the Abbey’s bookkeeper and treasurer. Brother Bonaventure Schweiger—an engineer, trained chef, and skilled mechanic—served in the Korean War. Utah native Brother John Joseph Peczuh was a carpenter and known as “the laundry monk.” He served in the U.S. Army from 1950 to 1952. Two of the Utah Brother Davids (McManus and Baumbach) served in the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War.

This week I stood at their gravesides and remembered these fine men who, quite literally, turned their swords into plowshares. New monastery property owners Bill and Alane White, some of their friends, and some of my family joined me in putting American flags by the white crosses marking their final resting places.

I was honored to be there for the still-living Utah Trappists who knew and loved them, including Father Alan Hohl, now 94 years old. Father Alan joined the Navy at the end of WWII and flew air patrols over the Aleutian Islands for two years. He lived in Navy Quonset huts in Alaska, and was drawn to the Quonset hut monastery that the Trappists erected in Huntsville in 1948. A place in the quaint Abbey cemetery awaits him too.

We should never appreciate war, but we can admire a loving response to it. World War II’s destruction was self-inflicted, a conflagration that torched every human life, even those of us born almost two decades after it ended. Yet, as with any raging inferno, and like the phoenix, afterwards little shoots of new life sprouted from the ashes and blossomed amidst the devastation.

Some of those flowers grew on the quiet grounds of the simple Ogden Valley monastery where I stood on Memorial Day, three score and fifteen years after World War II ended.

*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.