By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
We lawyers love to solve mysteries. One that recently vexed my fellow lawyer Bill White (owner of the old Huntsville monastery farm) and me was the origin/meaning of a beautiful but aging white statue Bill inherited from the Trappist Abbey of the Holy Trinity. We took on the case by researching the facts and interviewing the relevant witnesses.
The retired Ogden Valley monks each gave us an important piece of the puzzle. One said the statue was called “Our Lady of Confidence” and that she graced the front of the Abbey church in the 1950s before the monastery’s beloved stained glass window was installed. Another monk told us the statue was moved in the 1960s to the cloister garden courtyard in the middle of the monastery quadrangle.
The big break in the case came, however, when one of the monks remembered that the Utah monastery bought the statue in 1950 from a fellow Trappist in France. The sculptor’s name was Louis Richomme, known as Father Marie-Bernard (1883 to 1975), an artistic ironworker who entered the Abbey of La Trappe de Soligny in 1907 at age twenty-four.
La Trappe is one of the most important of the world-wide Cistercian Abbeys. Its abbot in the year 1662—Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé (godson of Cardinal Richelieu)—led a thorough reform of the Cistercian Order. Thereafter, the movement adopted the name of the Abbey, and now have “Trappist” monks.
La Trappe Abbey was suppressed during the French Revolution, but restored and re-consecrated in 1832. French kings Charles X (the last Bourbon monarch) and Louis Philippe (the last French king) took retreats there. The monastery was entirely rebuilt again in 1895.
Father Marie-Bernard worked as the handyman at the famous monastery, but also was an artist and sculptor. Just after World War I, at the request of the nearby Carmelite nuns from the convent at Lisieux, he produced statues of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, known in Catholic circles as “the Little Flower.” One of his statues, showing Thérèse covering her crucifix with roses, is very well known and was reproduced over 200,000 times and sent throughout the world.
A biographer has said that Father Marie-Bernard was known in his monastery as the “teacher of joy,” because he advocated the “spirituality of smiling.” He liked to say, “Joy is the veneer of love: a singing soul is a soul enchanted with God.” In 1940, Father Marie-Bernard sculpted and sent a new image of Mary to a neighboring Trappist Abbey caught in the middle of the emerging World War II.
He hoped it would protect his fellow monks, and so he called the new image of “Our Lady of Confidence.” After the June 1944 Allied landings in Normandy, Father Marie-Bernard’s own Abbey of La Trappe also was in the middle of the combat zone. The monks there prayed for protection and promised to raise a statue of Our Lady of Confidence on the hill above the monastery if they emerged unscathed from the turmoil. It worked.
A military hospital for the wounded replaced the Nazi SS regiment that had occupied La Trappe earlier in 1944. The Germans painted red crosses on the roofs of the monastery buildings, saving them from Allied bombardments. No stone in the Abbey suffered any damage. True to their word, in October 1947, the Trappist monks erected the large sculpture that still can be seen today by visitors—the “Statue de Notre-Dame de la Confiance.”
The statue, placed on a hill near La Trappe during the same year the Ogden Valley monastery started, celebrated its 70th anniversary three years ago. Utah’s smaller version of the famous image of Mary the protector is 70 years old this year. Appropriately, she now watches over the three dozen Huntsville Trappists laid to rest in the Holy Trinity Abbey cemetery.
Case closed!
Based on a referral from Deacon George Reade, chancellor of the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, Bill White hired some artists/sculptors from Evanston, Wyoming—Catherine and Craig Holt—to restore and weather-proof the 70 year old statue from the now-closed Trappist monastery (see: Evanston couple restores 70-year-old Mary statue). No doubt, this tender loving care will give Utah’s Our Lady of Confidence many more fruitful years watching over the monks in Huntsville. Bill hopes to re-dedicate it next spring.
Sculptor Father Marie-Bernard once explained the meaning of his unique image of Mary this way, “The Blessed Virgin is the incomparable model of trusting prayer to which God can never refuse anything.” (see: La Trappe statue) This is perfect for lawyers such as Bill and me. We like a statue of no limitations.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in August 2021.
