By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
For many decades, a lovely set of painted tiles displayed the image of Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, on an outside wall at my beloved Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. Until recently, where they came from, and what happened to them when the abbey closed in 2017, were both a bit of a mystery to me.
I do know that the historic backstory started almost 500 years ago. In December 1531, an indigenous Mexican peasant named Juan Diego reported seeing a vision of Mary, the mother of Jesus, at a place called the Hill of Tepeyac in Villa de Guadalupe, a suburb of Mexico City.
The local archbishop was skeptical of the account, and asked for proof. On a subsequent apparition, Mary told Juan Diego to gather some flowers from the top of Tepeyac Hill. Despite the winter season, he found Castilian roses—not native to Mexico—in full bloom.
Mary placed the roses in Juan Diego’s tilma (cloak) and told him to take the cloak to the archbishop. When Juan Diego and the archbishop later removed the flowers, they discovered a beautiful image of Mary with brown skin imprinted on the cloak. The cloak has been associated with several miracles and venerated ever since then.
Today, the cloak is on display at the Basilica of Guadalupe erected on the site of the apparitions. Our Lady of Guadalupe holds a special place in the culture and religious life of indigenous peoples, of Mexico, and indeed of all of the Americas. She is the only Marian apparition in the Western Hemisphere.
Her image often is included in the middle of the red, green, and white Mexican flag. In the 1960s, César Chávez used the image during his battle for farmworkers’ rights. In 2002, Pope John Paul II canonized Juan Diego (also called Cuauhtlatohuac…“The eagle who speaks”) as a saint and declared Our Lady of Guadalupe as the Patroness of the Americas.
Our Lady of Guadalupe has special meaning for a western outpost like Utah too, where many Catholics enjoy a Hispanic heritage. The local cathedral displays her image and many parishes note and celebrate her December feast day.
A Salt Lake City area church and some schools are named for both her and for Juan Diego. In the late 1970s, my own high school math teacher—a Jesuit priest—took a brief break from algebra and calculus each mid-December to remind us of the miraculous events on Tepeyac Hill.
The monks at Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah, honored the Patroness of the Americas in their own ways too, including with the Guadalupe tiles. The tiles depicted the recognizable virgin image within an intricate decorated border of blue and white. Monks like my friend Father Patrick Boyle stopped at the colorful icon and prayed each day on their way—like fellow farmer Juan Diego—to or from work in fields or barns.
Much of the wonderful religious art from the old Huntsville monastery has been preserved. The church’s spectacular Salve stained glass window was relocated to Holy Family church in Ogden, Utah. Several of the icons, crucifixes, and statues the monks erected in their nearby woods remain on site.
The 70-year old statue of Mary designed by a Trappist monk from France was restored and now watches over the monks’ cemetery. Another Mary statue is at a Catholic church in Copperton, Utah. And the St. Francis statue created by a California artist still graces the abbey’s hermitage.
But what about the Guadalupe tiles? Where did they come from and where did they go? To steal a line from a song in an animated movie (Anastasia) my children watched, “It’s a rumor. A legend. A mystery!”
No one has been able to tell me about their specific beginnings. Father Patrick recalls they were there starting in about 1952, when he was just a young novice at the monastery. He thinks they were made somewhere in Utah, but says they were installed without advance notice, explanation, or fanfare.
Where did they go? The current landowner and monastery steward, Bill White, noticed the tiles were gone before the abbey closed in 2017, but knew nothing more. None of the five surviving monks in Utah could identify the tiles’ new home. I asked several other persons who might know. None did. We feared they had been stolen or destroyed.
Finally, after several more inquiries, we got a break in the case when a friend of the monks told Bill White that he heard the tiles went to a California abbey. Former Holy Trinity Abbey superior Father Brendan Freeman (now in Ireland) confirmed, as did Trappist Father Paul Mark Schwan, the abbot of the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux in Vina, California, where the tiles have a happy new home just outside the monastery’s chapter room.
Father Paul Mark told me the tiles serve “as a beautiful reminder of the 70 years of Cistercian life at our older sister house and the special connection Vina had with Huntsville. One of the founders of Huntsville changed stability [moved] to Vina and then was elected our first abbot, Eusebius Wagner. Also one of the early monks who contributed so much to the early life of Huntsville, Brother Stan Sprouffske, came to Vina in 1968 and changed his stability. Stan was responsible for building the cow shed across the pasture behind the [Utah] monastery and installing the stained glass Salve window in the church.”
Another gift to Vina from Holy Trinity Abbey was Father Charles Cummings, a longtime Utah monk who was transferring to the California abbey when he passed away there in January 2020. He is buried at New Clairvaux. The presence of the Guadalupe tiles in Vina were familiar to him, and likely helped him feel at home, but maybe also punctuated this sentence from his 2010 Monastic Practices book: “Wherever we are right now is the place where God’s mysterious design has placed us and wants us to be.”
In his book No Man is an Island, famous Kentucky monk Thomas Merton wrote, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” It’s true. Art reveals God’s creation. When we leave a museum or concert, or finish reading a poem or book, the art is gone, perhaps replaced by a realization that nothing is permanent. Then we return, or someone else discovers the art, and there is resurrection and creation anew.
It is a wondrous mystery. It is, I think, the real mystery of the Guadalupe tiles.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) 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, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
