Sustainable Brother Stanislaus

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Much of the new millennium’s chatter is about innovative and cutting edge ideas, such as sustainability. Many of these “new” concepts, however, long have been part of the daily life of the Trappist monks, a religious order founded well over a millennium ago. In fact, one monk who was well ahead of the sustainability curve built an iconic feature of the now-closed Utah Trappist monastery.

Joseph (Joe) Sprouffske, born 115 years ago on November 16, 1904, was the son of Polish immigrants. He grew up with twelve siblings on a farm near Tacoma, Washington, at the southernmost point of Puget Sound. He served in the U.S. Navy, married young, but when the civil marriage did not work out, he answered a different calling. He joined the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity in Huntsville and took the name Brother Stanislaus.

Brother Stanislaus was a skilled artisan and carpenter. He installed the lovely stained glass window in front of the Abbey church. In the 1960s, the monastery abbot assigned him to design and build replacement choir stalls for the same chapel. Choir stalls, where the monks stand/sit facing each other for prayer and Gregorian chant eight times a day, are at the heart of Trappist life. The Utah monks had used temporary stalls built when they started the monastery in 1947.

I spent many happy boyhood days at the Utah monastery but I never met Stanislaus. My Trappist friend Father Alan Hohl describes his fellow Huntsville monk as a “very precise and very particular” craftsman. Father Alan, who for six decades managed the monastery’s water systems and, as cantor, led the monks in their daily chant, said Stanislaus spent years on the choir stall job. 

In addition to working long days in the wood shop to complete the project, Brother Stanislaus also instinctively understood that the heart of sustainable living involves recycling and repurposing resources and materials to reduce adverse human impact on the environment. (See: Recycled, repurposed and renovated: Builders adapting sustainable practices). Thus, he got the wood for the new choir stalls from discarded donated palettes that an Ogden business had used to ship products.

The overworked oak wood was in pretty rough shape when it arrived at the Abbey, according to Father Alan, but Stanislaus patiently smoothed and shaped each piece into lovely and functional individual seats and stalls for each of the monks. Any visitor to the monastery church to hear the Utah monks sing bore witness to Stanislaus’ handiwork, which stood quietly and gracefully beneath the colored glass reflections from the window he also installed.

For health reasons, Brother Stanislaus moved in 1969 from the Utah monastery to a Trappist monastery in Northern California. He spent his final years at the Abbey of New Clairvaux near Chico in in the small town of Vina, Tehama County. The monks’ farmland, once owned by Leland Stanford, still produces prunes, nuts, and most notably vineyard grapes from which the monks create handcrafted, award-winning wines (see: New Clairvaux Vineyard).

At New Clairveaux, Stanislaus continued his carpentry, took care of the lawns, and used the needlework skills his mother taught him to make beautiful vestments still used at the Abbey. He was sick and confined to bed the last year of his life, but the monastery’s biography of him notes he still responded to good morning greetings by saying, “Of course it’s good, it’s the only one we’ve got!”

Stanislaus died in October of 1996 and is buried in the Abbey cemetery (see: Joseph Sprouffske grave site). Although the Utah monastery now is closed, shortly before the structure was demolished, the new property owner Bill White (and our friends Kevin Sleater and Mike and Mary Jones) helped my wife and I retrieve and preserve the choir stall seats that Stanislaus built. In the spirit of the Sustainable Brother Stanislaus, we now are considering options to repurpose them once again. 

Father Alan says, “Trappists have always searched for land and things nobody wanted and then turned them into useful and productive things.” Fascinating humans these monks—retro and visionary, both at the same time.

*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.