Thankful for the delightful Irish monks of Iowa

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

In rural eastern Iowa, floating in the middle of a sea of corn fields, red barns, and silver silos, there is a wee bit o’ the Emerald Isle. ‘tis the lovely home of the delightful Irish Trappist monks who live at New Melleray Abbey.

There actually are three abbeys named Melleray. 

French monks founded the first one—the Abbey of Melleray—in 1134 in Bretagne, France. According to abbey lore, hungry monks looking for a new monastery site spent the night in a nearby forest and ate from a beehive they found in a hollow tree. They stayed there and named their new monastery “Meilleraie,” which means honeycomb.

The monastery thrived for six centuries but was suppressed in 1791, during the first French Revolution. The resident monks fled to Switzerland. The Trappists returned about twenty-five years later, after The Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. 

During another French Revolution in 1830, France expelled 60 Irish monks from the monastery and the country, viewing them as undesirable “Englishmen.” The exiled monks lived on a farm in County Kerry, Ireland until 1832, when a local Protestant baron gave them 500 acres near Waterford. There they established Mount Melleray Abbey. 

According to one abbey historian, a few years later during the Potato Famine, “pestilence, starvation and reckless English misrule united their forces to depopulate the land. The monks of Mount Melleray showed their heroic mettle by carrying on a herculean program of charity. Poor as their food was, they hastened to share all of it from their farm with the suffering masses. The records of those agonizing years will show that almost every day from four hundred to seven hundred destitute and distressed individuals obtained relief at the abbey.”

Yet, Mount Melleray’s Abbot Bruno Fitzgerald worried about whether he could continue to feed his monks. As a contingency plan, he decided to establish a new monastery in the United States to which he and his monastic brothers could retreat if necessary.

After scouting various options, in 1849 a small contingent of these Irish Trappist monks started New Melleray Abbey on donated farm and timber land in Iowa’s frontier near Dubuque. Irish Abbot Fitzgerald sent 16 more monks to join them the same year.

After a 77-day journey, however, only ten of them made it. A cholera plague killed six as they rode a steamer upriver from New Orleans. These Trappist monks are buried in and consecrate unknown locations along the banks of the ever-shifting Mississippi River.

Despite the harsh conditions, the Iowa Irish monks persevered. They farmed the land and built a lovely monastery with limestone from a nearby quarry. The monks endured more hardships during the following years. 

These trials included bitter winters, a huge debt from a brother’s ill-advised cattle speculation, and a lack of vocations in the early 1900s. At one point, the religious order’s leader said that a miracle from God was necessary to keep the abbey open. 

That miracle arrived just after World War II when over one hundred monks lived, worked, and prayed at the abbey. Today, the abbey’s website proclaims, “Now into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Irish heritage of friendliness and openness is still alive at New Melleray.”

We enjoyed that delightful love and hospitality when we visited New Melleray Abbey in early October 2022. We went to see Iowa’s Father Brendan Freeman, an old friend we met when he helped Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah close. I grew up at the Northern Utah abbey, a tale described in my memoir Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press 2021).

His St. Louis schoolmates and friends recall John Brendan Freeman as just a “regular guy” like them. The son of Irish immigrants, and the nephew of two Benedictine monks, in 1958 Brendan joined New Melleray Abbey at age 20. He finished his priesthood studies in Iowa and by 1973 also had earned a master’s degree in liturgical studies from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. and assumed various leadership roles at his Iowa monastery. In 1984, at age 45, his fellow Trappists elected Father Brendan as the new abbot of New Melleray Abbey.

Father Brendan is full of infectious joy. He gave us a tour of his Iowa monastic home, starting with the abbey’s simple but stunningly beautiful stone church. The sacred space features three-foot-thick walls, arched gothic windows, and huge wooden ceiling beams. At one point during church renovations in the 1970s, Brendan was working on one of these high beams in the rafters when his ladder slipped away. Suspended 40 feet up, the poor monk held onto the beam for dear life, just long enough for his brothers to drag over a construction scaffolding and save him.

The 82-year-old monk also took us on a driving tour of Dubuque. We saw spectacular views of the Mississippi River, met and sipped tea with the lovely candy-making Trappistine nuns at the nearby Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey, and dropped in on one of Brendan’s longtime friends. I had a wee bit of afternoon whiskey. 

A few years ago, Father Brendan led the monks’ difficult shift from agricultural work to building the now-famous Trappist caskets and urns. The abbey’s website notes that each of these sacred vessels, built from sustainable sources such as the monks’ own nearby forest, is “crafted in the rural quiet of the monastery, by hands accustomed to prayer.” 

An Iowa monk blesses every casket/urn and signs a card sending the blessing to the grieving friends and family. For each person buried in a Trappist casket or urn, the monks plant and consecrate a tree in the abbey’s forest. Every year the monks remember all their “customers” in a memorial mass.

While we were at New Melleray, Father Brendan introduced us to Brother John (Sean) O’Driscoll, the last Ireland-native monk living at the abbey. Born in County Cork, Brother John also spent several years at the Utah abbey, praying in its iconic Quonset hut buildings and riding his bike along mountain passes in the Ogden Valley.

I did not know him then, but Brother John worked closely with my Utah friend Father Alan Hohl. For years, they moved huge and heavy irrigation pipes together by hand. During our short New Melleray visit, we shared many wonderful memories of the Utah Trappists.

Not much good came from the Irish Potato famine, which killed a million people and sent another million into exile. Thankfully, however, some of those exiled Irish went to Iowa, and some made it to New England, including my own ancestors two or three generations back.

Perhaps that shared history explains why I immediately felt at home even on my first visit to New Melleray Abbey. It is a place that demonstrates, in so many ways and on so many levels, the power of life/love over death. I am grateful I was there.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here: https://michaelpobrien.com/) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (https://www.amazon.com/Monastery-Mornings-Unusual-Boyhood-Saints/dp/1640606491), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press in August 2021 and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best non-fiction book of 2022.