By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
While helping to find new homes for some the remaining items from the library at the now-closed Trappist monastery in Huntsville, I grew curious about how its wide variety of books was used. One primary use was for research, and one of the Utah monastery’s most prolific scholars was Father Casimir Bernas, 89, who now lives in retirement at St. Joseph’s Villa in Salt Lake City.
Father Casimir was born in Chicago to a Polish immigrant family, traveled with his military family during his youth, and eventually attended high school in Portland, Oregon. He joined the Huntsville, Utah monastery, Abbey of the Holy Trinity, in 1949 at age 19, after finishing high school and studying for a year at the University of Notre Dame.
With the support of the monastery’s abbot, Fr. Emmanuel Spillane, he studied to be a priest and received a licentiate (master’s degree) in Theology from the Angelicum University in Rome in 1959, and then a licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in 1961. Finally, he earned a doctorate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1975.
He wrote his doctorate dissertation about the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in New Testament times. It involved a study not only of scripture, but all the Jewish writings of the period and for centuries afterward; of spirituality, and of liturgy. He said. “It was an enjoyable experience; research and writing took about six years, much of it done at the monastery using our resources or those of the library at the University of Utah.” He also did two years of research in Rome.
Besides some articles for biblical reviews and for The New Catholic Encyclopedia, he mainly wrote book reviews, hundreds of them over the past nearly 60 years. They were published in such journals as The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, The Journal of Biblical Literature, and others. Mostly they were written for the scholarly community.
Trappist monasteries must be self-sufficient. Thus, besides writing and teaching, Father Casimir did just about every kind of work one can find in a monastery: cooking, cleaning, remodeling rooms, farm work of all kinds (mowing, baling, plowing, hay stacking, grain harvesting, etc.). An accomplished photographer, he took some wonderful photos of the beautiful Abbey grounds. Father Casimir also served as business manager and then abbot (leader) of the monastery for several years.
A friend of mine, who volunteered as the monks’ assistant librarian for a decade, once told me how the small monastery library and scriptorium was not air-conditioned in the summer months except by its open windows. At night, legions of moths sometimes descended into the library. They were kept in check only by a colony of bats that lived in the monks’ belfry. The bats ate the torsos of the moths, but left their wings behind. Thus, many a summer morning, little wings were left all over the library floor.
Books take you to amazing and faraway places, on flights of enlightenment and dialogue and understanding, just like they did for Father Casimir and the other monks. Wings…such a lovely and fitting image for remembering both the Utah monastery’s library and its many users.
(You can listen to a January 2018 interview Father Casimir gave to BYU Radio here: https://www.byuradio.org/episode/405299c0-8eef-4c32-901d-e49c0495dab8/in-good-faith-casimir-bernas-trappist-monk)
