By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Some of my favorite time spent with a fellow graduate of the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law has involved monks and monasteries rather than laws and legislation.
Bill White—from the ULaw Class of 1994—is the current owner, steward, cemetery manager, yard-care-guy, handy man, and conservationist of the now-closed Holy Trinity Abbey Catholic monastery near Huntsville in Northern Utah. I grew up at the old Trappist abbey, a story I tell in my 2021 book Monastery Mornings. I first met Bill when he heard about my book (then still an unpublished draft) and invited me out to lunch to talk about it.
Although neither monk nor Catholic, Bill was either doomed or destined to fulfill his current vocation when he was born on July 10, 1967, 20 years to the day after pioneer monks from Kentucky started the Utah monastery. Bill attended law school in the 1990s soon after he got married and started a family.
Most law students blow off steam by drinking at the local bars, skiing Utah’s fresh winter mountain powder, or jogging at the nearby college field house. Not Bill. To cope with the academic pressure and earn some money to support his growing family, Bill bought old houses and renovated them.
Those skills proved most valuable a few years later when Bill acquired the ultimate fixer-upper—the Utah monastery. The practice of law, however, is what really put Bill on the path to meet the Huntsville monks. After graduation he landed a job with the Utah Attorney General’s office in the water rights division and quickly taught himself water law.
For several years, Bill sorted out all manner of problems involving the elusive lifeblood of the arid American West as both a government lawyer and then as a private consultant. This led him to the doors of the Huntsville monastery when Bill and his wife Alane bought a home in the pristine rural Ogden Valley.
Bill introduced himself to the town council and asked how he could help. They needed a good water lawyer. Huntsville’s culinary water supply, water tank, and water treatment plant are all on the nearby monastery’s property, so the town leaders asked Bill to talk to the monks about some pending municipal water issues.
Bill had never met monks and was not excited about his assigned task. “I was actually kind of dreading it,” he once told me. “I didn’t know anything about Catholics or monks. I just thought, ‘This is going to be a weird experience with some weird people.’” Despite his trepidations, in 2014 Bill drove over to the abbey with Huntsville Mayor Jim Truett.
They met with Father Brendan Freeman, the superior (or leader) of the monastery, and with Father Alan Hohl, who managed the Abbey’s extensive water-related operations. “As soon as I sat down with them, I was surprised,” Bill told me, “Their demeanor was exactly the opposite of what I expected. They were funny and jovial and kind and just delightful people. We hit it off immediately.”
Afterwards, Bill was drawn back to the Utah monastery. He started riding his bike on the perimeter, then up the Abbey Road, and eventually all the way to the monastery church. He listened to the monks’ chant and visited their little bookstore. He told me, “I was so entranced that I wanted to come back, but I didn’t really feel like it was my place to come back up for no reason, so every time I would ride my bike or drive my car up to their parking lot, I felt obligated to go buy some jam. I had so many bottles of jam, my wife said, ‘What are you doing with all this jam?’”
The emerging friendship with the monks soon went beyond mere jam. The aging monks were reviewing options for the rapidly approaching day when Holy Trinity Abbey would have to close its doors and sell its land. Father Brendan asked Bill to explain conservation easements to him. By coincidence, for about a year Bill had been working on such an easement for his ranch in nearby Henefer, so he outlined the process.
A land design student group from Utah State University was helping the monks decide what to do with their property. One land use option involved high density residential and commercial development. When Bill found out from a student, he was horrified. Like many others in the Ogden Valley, Bill hoped the monastery land would remain a beautiful farm. Bill asked if the study team had reviewed a low-density option and whether they had considered a conservation easement. The student said no.
Bill loved the property and wanted to be the owner, so he started thinking about buying the monastery land himself with the idea of keeping the farm operating. He discussed the idea with Alane. They made an offer to the Utah monks, including a provision that allowed the monks to stay on the property under a life estate and continue to operate the monastery while Bill ran the farm behind the scenes. The Trappists loved the idea that their beautiful farm might continue to exist instead of being turned into a giant residential subdivision.
The deal closed in January of 2016. The Vatican had to approve the sale, the first time Bill had confronted that unique real estate contingency. Bill could access the property whenever he wanted, but he had to be quiet. This “solitude clause” ensured there was no extra noise or anything that would interfere with the monks’ contemplative religious lifestyle.
Thereafter, Bill was a regular—but quiet—fixture at the abbey. There were many meetings to work out details of the transition—a few too many, perhaps, because Bill suspects the monks sometimes had an ulterior motive. They always invited Alane to attend too, assuming correctly that she would bring her homemade chocolate chip cookies which they loved.
One day the monks invited Bill to their weekly community meeting. Afterwards, they said, “Come and sing with us in the choir.” They gave him one of their little prayer books with the Psalms and led him into the church. Bill, the man who a few years earlier was reluctant even to meet with these “weird” men, now was thrilled and honored to stand in their choir stalls and pray with them. Afterwards, the monks told him, “Now you are one of us.”
Being one of them, however, was not always easy. As Bill watched and time passed, it became clear that the notion of the aging monks staying at the abbey was wishful thinking. Most were over the age of 90. Several had serious physical infirmities or health problems and needed regular specialized medical care.
As a result, the monks decided to close their monastery in August 2017, and they moved to an assisted living center in Salt Lake City. They also donated millions of dollars to local charities and Catholic schools, all from their labor and investments. “This was from our blood, sweat and tears,” Father Brendan told a local newspaper. “These men earned money on the farm and never spent it on themselves.”
It was like losing family. Bill visited them at their care center and hosted them at his Huntsville home for barbeques. (In addition to her chocolate chip cookies, the monks loved Alane’s potato salad.) While there is only one living monk left in Utah, Bill still tenderly cares for the three dozen Trappists buried under simple white crosses on his monastery land. I often tease him for not taking the “cemetery management course” offered in law school.
Ownership of the monastery land has been a mixed blessing for Bill and his family. He loves the place, explaining, “The Utah State Historical Preservation Society was up here one day filming. They wanted to do a little film about the monastery, and in the end of the film said they hoped we can continue to preserve this magical, other-worldly place. And that’s kind of a good way to put it. It is other worldly. It’s a spiritual place.”
Yet, Bill may lose money trying to preserve it. He often faces tough choices about managing the property. Many original monk buildings were beyond repair and had to be torn down. He restored one old barn and asked a local artist to paint a huge mural of a monk on it. The Quonset hut monastery building, however, was riddled with asbestos with a $12 million price tag to restore it. Bill offered it free to anyone who would agree to properly preserve it. There were no takers, and the old quadrangle came down.
Bill saved the church bells and donated the monks’ 20-foot-tall stained-glass window to a South Ogden Catholic Church. He also gave many old wooden church pews to local Catholic schools and to a new Greek Orthodox church opening in Salt Lake City. With help from Summit Land Conservancy and the Ogden Valley Land Trust, Bill finalized a conservation easement for the old monastery land in 2021.
Even with the easement in place, however, Bill must find a way for the farm to at least break even financially on a regular basis, or else it cannot continue to operate. He has hired some family farmers from West Weber to make a go of it, and so there’s reason for hope. I help when I can.
I write a lot about the monks. Bill and I both chipped in to restore a monastery statue. Our families put American flags on the monks’ graves every Memorial Day.
Bill and I also have spoken together to many groups, including the architectural firm that designed the original monastery buildings, the Ogden Valley Library, the Sons of the Utah Pioneers, the Kentucky Farm Bureau, St. Thomas More (yes, a fellow lawyer!) Catholic Church, and the Weber County Heritage Foundation. I talk about the happy ghosts of monks past. Bill outlines the present and the hopeful future.
When I started law school over four decades ago at the University of Utah (Class of 1986), a professor told us we would encounter many different and non-traditional methods of using our law degrees. I’m biased, but I think my fellow alum Bill White has discovered one of the very best of those unique ways.
When the first Trappist monks arrived at the site of their future monastery in the Ogden Valley on July 10, 1947, their leader softly declared, “I think this place is near to Heaven, and it should be our endeavor to make it more so.” For seventy years, the Utah monks did just that and created a little bit of Heaven on earth.
Bill White—God bless him—is trying to keep it that way.
(The University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law published a version of this article on August 8, 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 Monk,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
