The Trip West Seventy-five years ago: The Trappist Monks come to Utah

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

(Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Monastery Mornings by Michael Patrick O’Brien, published by Paraclete Press in August 2021).

During one of our early visits to the monastery, my mother and sister walked into the monks’ church, but I lingered behind, curious to explore something I had noticed earlier. I slipped through an unlocked wooden fence gate and walked tentatively into a small grassy field adjoining the church. Initially, I hesitated just inside the gate, but soon several small white crosses drew me further into the middle of what was the well-kept monastery cemetery. Within moments, I was standing on the graves of ten monks and reading the simple crosses marking their burial sites.

The inscriptions did not include much information, only a name and some dates, but I was intrigued. I recognized some names as Irish, including “Michael Francis Carney.” Others were more exotic. I liked “Ivo Kilawee.” I laughed as I tried to quickly say three times: “Tescelin Szwagdys.” I saw “Antonius Maria Josephus Lans” and wondered if his Latinized names meant he was someone important. Eventually, the monastery bells started to ring and so I left the graveyard and joined my family in the chapel, wondering, who were these men?

My inquiring mind eventually overpowered my concerns that I would get into trouble for sneaking into the cemetery, so I asked some of the live monks to tell me about the dead monks I had encountered. It was the beginning of a lifelong quest to know more about these unusual men into whose strange world I had stumbled. Over time, after asking questions, listening for clues, poking around the guesthouse library, and doing additional research, I learned their story.

It began on July 7, 1947. On that hot summer day, three-dozen men, all members of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OCSO), boarded a train and departed from their home at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, forty-four miles south of Louisville in the rolling hill country of central Kentucky. 

Their leader bore the lengthy and impressive name I saw on my first cemetery visit─ Father Antonius Maria Josephus Lans, a solemn-looking priest originally from Holland but very well-travelled. He had worked as a landscaper in Southern California before becoming a monk. The Gethsemani abbot, Father Frederic Dunne, joined the group of contemplative pioneers on the trip. Father Dunne’s grandparents were Irish, and he was the first American to become a Cistercian abbot. Accompanying the two abbots were many other monks, including some of my other graveyard acquaintances: a World War II veteran and theology professor from Brooklyn named Father Ivo Kilawee; a simple monk born in Ireland called Brother Matthew (aka Michael Francis Carney), and another Brooklyn native Brother Tescelin Szwagdys, named after a Burgundian knight also called Tescelin, the father of one of the greatest of the Cistercian monks, St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

The train and monks were headed to Huntsville, Utah, an agrarian town nestled in the Ogden Valley 1,500 miles from Kentucky. The towering, 9,500-foot Mount Ogden shelters the valley, which is nurtured by a steady flow of several forks of the Ogden River. The brothers planned to build a new monastery on ranchland they had acquired. They wanted to dedicate it to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to christen it Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity. Why? In the 1940s, Gethsemani Abbey was overflowing with monks, and had to reduce the pressure by exporting some of them. A fellow Trappist left behind in Kentucky—named Thomas Merton—noted “phenomenal” growth in Kentucky, with service men (back from World War II) “lining up four and five at a time” to trade in khaki for monk robes, observing, “There has hardly been anywhere for them to sleep.”   

Why Utah? Abbot Dunne preferred to create new monasteries in places where the population was predominantly non-Catholic. One of his assistants, Father Gerard McGinley, wrote and told his sister—a Benedictine nun working near Huntsville at St. Benedict’s Hospital in Ogden—about the monks’ expansion plans. It was Sister Myron McGinley who wrote back, suggesting locating the monastery in Utah, where two-thirds of the residents belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, then often known as the Mormons.   

Intrigued, Dunne made several trips to Utah to scout out property. Foregoing his traditional robes, he camouflaged himself as a layperson, once even wearing a hunting outfit, to conceal his identity and avoid the sectarian suspicion that might arise at the sight of a monk scouting out property or seeking to buy so much land in Utah. Dunne was a hardworking abbot, involved in setting up two or three new monasteries at the same time. His numerous train trips, including to the high altitudes of Utah, taxed his heart condition, and after one of them, he suffered a hemorrhage. When someone suggested he let another monk replace him on future journeys, Dunne laughingly responded, “If anyone has to bleed for that foundation, I’m the man.” He did take at least one brief break from his hard work when he remembered, during a trip out west, to collect some Utah stones and bring them back for the niece of a friend, a Kentucky businessman. The young girl had asked for a part of the Rocky Mountains. 

Over the course of several visits in 1946 and 1947, Father Dunne came to like the setting of the William C. Parke Ranch near Huntsville. Parke had been in the feed and cattle business. Before he owned the ranch, the same land was a co-op farm owned by the local Huntsville ward (the Latter-day Saint version of a parish). Dunne collaborated with Utah’s Catholic Bishop Duane G. Hunt and with an Ogden parish priest to purchase the ranch. The owners jacked up the price, allegedly to keep the monks out, but Captain James William Kinnarney, a shareholder in—and head of police/security for—Kentucky’s Churchill Downs, contributed and raised the necessary funds. The monks paid $100,000 for 1,600 acres of land, about sixty dollars per acre. 

In stark contrast to other places in Utah bearing names such as Purgatory Flats, Devil’s Canyon, Hell’s Backbone Ridge, and Devil’s Slide (a massive limestone chute in Weber Canyon about a half hour’s drive from the monastery), Ogden Valley was, in many ways, the perfect place to start a monastery. Just northeast rises a 9,000-foot peak called Monte Cristo—the mountain of Christ—although no one seems to know why it has that name. Drive a few miles outside Huntsville and you find yourself in an unincorporated community called Eden. Moreover, Utah and its dominant church frequently are associated with or even called Zion, which in the Bible refers to the hill on which Jerusalem sat.

The monks travelled from Kentucky in two designated Pullman train cars. One was full of monks. The other overflowed with supplies (altars, stools, candlesticks, bookstands, vestments, books, chalices, altar linens, cruets, and many other things) for the new abbey. The cars also were stocked with food for the long voyage, including fruits and rolls. Well-wishers added to the food supply during the journey, including nontraditional monk food such as doughnuts. The monk caravan first stopped in Louisville, and then moved on to St. Louis. In the Gateway City, a crowd gathered at the rail station as the brothers said Mass in their car during a six-hour stopover. Merton noted: “The car had been there for several hours, and the monks were inside with the blinds down, and many curious people were on the outside in the hot sun, and one porter and three yard detectives were keeping the people on the outside from getting at the monks on the inside. Either that, or they were keeping the monks in the car from escaping. No one could be quite sure which.”

The train continued through Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and eventually arrived in Salt Lake City. As they rode the rails westward, the monks tried to maintain some semblance of their established monastic routine such as worship, prayers, chants, solitude, and related practices.  

They also took advantage of the sightseeing opportunities typically unavailable to a Trappist monk. One traveling monk observed: “Trappists are, among other things, farmers. And they took a considerable interest in the corn that was growing in Missouri and the wheat that was being harvested in Kansas. But they are, above all, contemplatives: and the Rocky Mountains are nothing to be despised! They have something very eloquent to say about the God Whose power they reflect: and if the Trappists did not have an ear to catch that message—who would be there to hear it?” 

Many of the brothers took to the train windows to take in the mountainous and rugged western landscape. Awestruck, one exclaimed, “How shallow the mind of that person who said that when God came to this part of the world, he just left it all piled up. No. We are among those inaccessible heights where even angels fear to tread. This country was made to order for the glory of God.” Even the monastic group’s stern-looking leader, Father Lans, stayed up for all of one night “looking out the window, and enjoying the beautiful moonlight reflected in the rivers and streams. He had no opportunity for such sights for many years, so it was quite a treat for him to behold the soft splendor of our Lady’s mantle, the moon.” 

After a long journey, the Trappists arrived safely in Ogden on July 10, 1947. A delegation made up of the local Catholic parish priest, Monsignor Patrick F. Kennedy of St. Joseph’s Church, and other Catholic dignitaries met their train at the station. The Ogden Standard-Examiner newspaper welcomed them with a photo and large headline: “Trappists Greeted Upon Arrival From Kentucky.” If the sight of three-dozen, bald, robed monks disembarking from a train in downtown Ogden was not enough to shock and worry the predominantly non-Catholic population, their baggage probably did the trick. Although teetotalers themselves, the monks had used old liquor crates and boxes to pack their stuff. Merton wrote, “If the Mormons were paying attention as the monks detrained in Ogden, they must have been scandalized to see so many boxes labeled ‘Schenley’s’ and ‘Green River.’”

Monsignor Kennedy transported the two Trappist leaders in his car, and a chartered bus carried the rest of the group to Huntsville. The caravan stopped for a moment at nearby St. Joseph’s Church, and then drove the same route my family later did to get to the monastery.  When the pioneer leader Brigham Young first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley a hundred years earlier in 1847, he exclaimed, “This is the right place!” Similarly, when the monks arrived at the site of their future monastery some sixty miles north of where Brigham Young arrived, Abbot Dunne softly declared, “I think this place is near to Heaven, and it should be our endeavor to make it more so.” 

The monks spent the next seventy years doing exactly that.

*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.