By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Usually I write about the monks I know/knew, including those who retired to Salt Lake City after Huntsville’s Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity closed in August 2017. Two of the most interesting Utah Trappists, however, are former monks I never met.
They were Lawrence Aloysius Finn from New York City, the first Trappist priest ordained in Utah, and Richard John Finan from Ohio, the first deaf person admitted to the abbey.
Lawrence Finn was born in 1920. He joined the Trappists at Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey in September 1936 at the tender age 16 and took final vows in December 1944. He was ordained a deacon in June 1947 just before leaving—on a train headed west—to help start the new Utah monastery. He took on the religious name of Father Patrick Finn.
Salt Lake City Catholic Bishop Duane G. Hunt ordained Finn as a priest in front of his family and the monks in August 1947, about a month after the Trappists arrived in the Ogden Valley. His mother and sister presented hand-sewn vestments to the first monk ordained in Utah. Bishop Hunt told the Trappists that the ordination was the “first great blessing that your coming in our midst has brought us.”
A few years earlier, at age 25, Father Patrick Finn had fallen off a truck and injured his spine while working in a monastery wheat field. He suffered from severe pain and partial paralysis in his arms. In 1950, the Huntsville Trappists sent him to Montreal for surgery which they hoped would relieve his symptoms.
He never went back. A Los Angeles Times article later reported that Father Patrick soon would manage a “lonely leper colony in a desolate backwoods region of The Philippine Islands.” He told the newspaper he always had yearned to do this type of missionary work.
During his long hospital stay in Montreal, Father Patrick had watched a movie about St. Damien of Molokai’s ministry to victims of Hansen’s disease (leprosy) (see On vacation with St. Damien of Molokai). He vowed to do the same work if his operation succeeded. It did, so he studied nursing and according to news reports, made “persistent pleas” to his Trappist leaders for permission to work with lepers.
They agreed. Father Patrick worked for almost four years at an Okinawa colony before accepting an offer to work at the Bicol leprosarium, near Naga in The Philippines. He arrived there with six tons of donated farm and building tools. A 1956 newspaper article reported he was caring for some 400 lepers and had just built a nursery for the children of the colony residents.
At about the same time that Patrick Finn joined Gethsemani Abbey, a toddler named Richard John Finan—born in 1933 in Zanesville, Ohio—got meningitis, lost his hearing, and thereafter attended a Catholic school for the deaf in Cincinnati. In 1958, after graduating from high school and working for six years in a match factory and then as a linotype operator, he decided to join the Huntsville Trappist monastery.
Years ahead of the Americans with Disabilities Act mandate of reasonable accommodation for disabled Americans, the Utah Cistercians developed special protocols to help their new deaf Brother Richard. Instead of rising to the sound of the abbey bells, a fellow monk woke him up every morning. The monks also developed a special spiritual reading program for the monk with disabilities. And of course, the Trappists were silent much of the time too, and already communicated with a sign language.
Brother Richard took his final monk vows in 1965, in front of his fellow Trappists, his family, and a nun who taught him at the deaf school. Several newspaper articles indicate that in 1971, he and two other Utah monks volunteered to help start a new monastery in The Philippines.
After visiting family in Ohio in 1972, Brother Richard arrived on Guimaras Island, near Iloilo City. He helped found Our Lady of the Philippines Trappist Monastery there, the first and so far only Cistercian monastery in the South Asian archipelago nation. News accounts said the monks planned to live like the common “tao” or poor person, in a monastery building made from bamboo and thatched with palm leaves.
I have searched for other reports describing what these two interesting men did during their missionary work in The Philippines, but the news trail seems to end with their arrival there. I heard that both monks eventually left the Trappist order for other callings, but the details of such decisions are not reported. Thus, I only know basic details about the rest of their lives
A March 1962 Honolulu news brief reported the sudden death, at age 41, of a man named Lawrence Aloysius Finn. The news brief said he used to be a security officer at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach, but noted that when he died, he was an instructor at the International Education Center in Tokyo. He was about to be married. The article also identified his New York City parents, giving the same names as the people who attended Father Patrick Finn’s August 1947 ordination in Huntsville.
My Ancestry.com research shows that a man named Richard J. Finan is buried at his family plot in an Ohio cemetery near Zanesville. For several years before passing, he had lived—and in 1994 died—in Adamstown, Maryland. A nearby grave marker reserves space for his wife. His 1933 birth date and the names of his parents on an adjoining tombstone match up with similar information in the news articles announcing Brother Richard Finan’s entry into Holy Trinity Abbey.
Why, after all their years of devoted service, did these monks apparently change the course of their lives so dramatically? Did they fall in love? Was it health problems? A mid-life or faith crisis? A reassessment of religious life in the aftermath of the Vatican II reforms? A new calling? Some other reasons? I probably never will know. The reasons, which may be none of my business, certainly involve a deeply-personal choice, and perhaps do not really matter all that much.
Shortly after Father Patrick Finn left Utah in 1950, a young man named John Boyle entered the Huntsville abbey and inherited the religious name of Patrick from his former colleague. Seven decades later, this man (my friend) now is 93 years old and lives with the surviving Utah monks at a retirement home in Salt Lake City.
What might someone like Father Patrick Boyle say about the unknown, non-monastic, last few years of Patrick Finn’s and Richard Finan’s lives? I have not asked him. I have noticed, however, that Trappist monks are extraordinarily kind to their departed brothers.
Father Patrick Boyle often reminds me that the religious life is not the only vocation or the only way to serve God or others. He also likes to tell people, from all walks of life, “You are right where God wants you to be.”
*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.
