The Monk who Came to Dinner

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

The only monk who ever came to my house for dinner was the one I never expected to be there.

It happened quite serendipitously, just before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the world in the early 2020s. I’d struck up an email correspondence with a California artist/priest named Stephen Frost who, in the 1970s, had sculpted a garden statue of St. Francis of Assisi for the old Huntsville Trappist monastery in Northern Utah.

The statue stood just outside the monks’ A-frame hermitage retreat house in the nearby Wasatch mountain foothills. I’d hoped to learn more about the statue and artist.

After he left the Utah abbey, Frost served as a diocesan priest for many years in his home state. He continued making good art too, and his works have been mentioned in several newspapers and exhibited throughout Southern California.

Frost eventually retired and lives in a small apartment above his art studio in Southern California. His colorful paintings, drawings, and sculptures are, according to his website, “artifacts of encounter with the other world that invite the viewer into the experience.”

Soon after we started corresponding, Frost visited Salt Lake City and so I invited him to dinner. He asked if he could bring along one of the Utah monks. I agreed and asked which one. He said, “Fr. Casimir Bernas.”

I was surprised. As explained in my 2021 book Monastery Mornings, I grew up at the old Huntsville abbey and had met Father Casimir before, but he was one of the few monks I did not know well.

Turns out there was a lot to know.

Father Casimir was born in Chicago in 1930 to Polish immigrants. He moved around with his military family, but eventually they settled in Portland, Oregon. He joined the Utah monastery in 1949 at age 19, right after high school and a year at the University of Notre Dame. 

With the support of the monastery’s abbot, Casimir studied to be a priest and received a licentiate (master’s degree) in Theology from the Angelicum University in Rome in 1959. He then got a licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in 1961. 

Finally, he earned a doctorate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1975. He wrote his unique doctoral dissertation about the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in New Testament times.

From my boyhood observations, I’d developed the distinct impression that Casimir was benevolently aloof. He seemed quiet, studious, introverted, and brilliant. 

Moreover, as a distinguished church scholar, he was several levels above my pay grade. As a result, we did not interact much and instead I developed friendships with the more outgoing monks I met who drove tractors and took care of chickens. 

Of course, Casimir also had made a vow of stability (to stay in one place) and practiced monastic silence and prayer. He was serious about these commitments, once telling a newspaper that monks lived “a solitary life. We’re not gloomy but we’re not engaged in a lot of backslapping either.”

No wonder we did not interact all that much at first.

What I didn’t see or realize at the time is that Casimir also was a normal and curious person with a great interest in the world around him. In addition to writing and teaching, he also did just about every kind of work one can do in a monastery including cooking, cleaning, remodeling rooms, and farm work. 

While on leave from the monastery to care for his sick father, Casimir developed an expertise in the classic cinema. An accomplished photographer, he took wonderful photos of the beautiful abbey grounds and served as business manager of the monastery for several years.

He was one of the first Utah monks to learn how to use a computer. His fellow Trappists thought so highly of Casimir that they elected him their abbot in August 2001 at a time when they were trying to raise funds to build a new monastery cloister.

I got to experience these other sides of Casimir when he came to my house for dinner. 

It happened about two years after the Utah abbey closed in 2017, when Casimir and several other monks had moved to the St. Joseph’s Villa retirement home in Salt Lake City. Although they got some meals from the Villa, the monks also often had to fend for themselves by buying groceries and cooking their own food. 

As a result, I think Casimir appreciated the opportunity for a good home-cooked meal (one he did not have to make himself) and a nice glass of wine to go with it.

He was a delightful dinner companion…erudite yet humble, a good conversationalist, and extremely polite and appreciative of both the meal and the company. It was the first time I heard many of the interesting details of his backstory described above.

Before he left, I asked him to sign his published dissertation about Yom Kippur for me. I’d found a copy in a stack of the old Utah monastery’s library books for which I was trying to find new homes. He seemed tickled to do so, and we spoke of getting together again.

The meal was a poignant reminder that although you can know someone for a long time without being friends, at the right moment that relationship can blossom into a friendship. Sadly for me, this budding friendship emerged too late and towards the end of Casimir’s life. 

The five years that followed our dinner together were years of decline for him, as he aged from 89 to 94. Sister Pamela Fletcher—a friend of Casimir from Santa Rita Abbey, the women’s Trappist monastery located near Tucson—once told me that the 90s are not a decade for the faint of heart. 

She’s right.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, the world stopped and then abruptly changed. Casimir got COVID just like most of the rest of us did. He survived, but it weakened him.

Thereafter, year by year, he dealt with a series of health setbacks, as did many of the other now-elderly relocated Utah monks. Although difficult, they all handled it with their usual monk-like pluck, grace, patience, and dignity.

There was another monk at the Villa who often had clashed with Casimir when they were at the old monastery together. They had very different views on how to live the monastic life.

One day at the Villa, however, he confessed to Casimir, “I could die in my apartment, and no one would know for several days.” They decided to put their longstanding disagreements aside in favor of their mutual humanity and monastic brotherhood.

As long as they were able to do so afterwards, these former rivals called each other twice a day to make sure they both were not just alive, but OK too. As I’ve said before, there’s something about monks that never fails to amaze me.

That other monk passed away in early 2022, but Casimir continued the phone-a-monk practice with several of the other Trappists living at the Villa until he too passed away on August 9, 2024. He was just shy of his 95th birthday. 

Casimir once told an interviewer from BYUtv that the local tradition of his cloistered Utah monastery was “not to be too cut off from the world, and I think that’s a good thing.” I agree with him.

Had he thought otherwise, I’d have missed out on the priceless experience of getting to know that kind and wonderful monk who came to dinner.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.