Trappist monks throw good parties

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

(Editor’s note: In 2023, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky celebrates its 175^th anniversary.)

Like the rest of us, Trappist monks celebrate round number anniversaries with good parties. I saw three of them, all at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. 

As described in my book Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press 2021), the monks befriended my family after a difficult divorce. We helped the Trappists celebrate their 25th and 50th foundation anniversaries in 1972 and 1997. After the abbey closed in 2017, in 2022 we still celebrated the monastery’s 75th birthday. The local neighbors—many of them Latter-day Saints—helped with each such event.

Although vegetarians the rest of the year, the Huntsville monks honored their Kentucky roots (they arrived in Utah from Gethsemani Abbey on July 10, 1947) by ordering KFC buckets. The chicken was delicious, of course, but it was only years later that I realized the clever sense of humor in that particular menu choice.

Gethsemani Abbey has staged some wonderful anniversaries too. 

During the monastery’s 50th anniversary year in 1898, the Gethsemani monks elected one of their most impactful leaders ever—Abbot Edmond Obrecht. A cardinal from Philadelphia attended their public celebration, held in the warmer weather just a few months after the actual December 21, 1848, foundation date. 

There was a big celebration at Gethsemani for the monastery’s 75th foundation anniversary in 1924. It was triple jubilee: 75 years for the abbey, 50 years as a monk for Obrecht, and 25 years for Obrecht as abbot. Eighty monks lived at the abbey at the time.

During the 150th anniversary celebration in 1998, the seventy monks at the abbey voted to give archives access to a female writer from the Louisville Courier-Journal. Dianne Aprile wrote and published a comprehensive history of the monastery, called The Abbey of Gethsemani: Place of Paradox and Peace.

The Gethsemani centennial year (1948-49), however, likely was the most eventful of them all. One hundred and sixty-five monks lived at the abbey at the time. Contemporary local newspaper reports, and article by a monk who was there (See “Thomas Merton’s Gethsemani” by Benjamin Clark OCSO), tell the full  story. Here are some highlights.

Early in the centennial year, Henry Luce (the Time magazine publisher) and his wife Clare Booth Luce (a writer and former member of Congress) offered their beautiful 7,000 acre South Carolina Mepkin plantation for a new abbey. Soon after, Thomas Merton published his book The Seven Storey Mountain in July. The local bishop ordained Merton as a deacon in December.

In August 1948 Abbot Frederic Dunne died in Knoxville, Tennessee, enroute to visit the new foundation he had established the year before in Conyers, Georgia. The “orphaned” Kentucky monks mourned the unexpected death of the first American-Born Cistercian abbot.

Later in August, the Gethsemani monks elected James Fox (the Georgia abbot at the time) as their abbot. The Gethsemani election was similar to papal conclaves— the monks were locked in a room, old ballots were burned, and white or black smoke told the outcome. 

Utah’s monks had the right to vote in that abbatial election because they still were part of Gethsemani, but they waived the right due to the difficulties of traveling back to Kentucky. After Fox’s election, the Georgia monks chose the highly-regarded Utah monk Father Robert McMann to serve as their new abbot.

On December 21, 1948, several bishops and archbishops attended the Gethsemani centennial celebration Mass. Community members also performed a play written by Gethsemani’s other famous author, Fr. Raymond Flanagan, about the early days of the abbey. The unusual event was controversial among some of the monks.

The monks hosted a public celebration outdoors in June 1949, one week after Merton’s ordination as a priest. Over seven thousand people attended, including Kentucky’s governor, one of its United States senators, and even Commissioner of Baseball Happy Chandler. Military personnel from Fort Knox helped with crowd control. 

Captain James Kinnarney, head of security for Churchill Downs, had helped the monks raise the money to start the Utah abbey. Was he invited to the centennial dinner in 1948? Not sure (and maybe not). Four years earlier, the gregarious Kinnarney was at the dinner for Abbot Dunne’s golden anniversary as a monk. At one point, he emptied a bottle of Kentucky’s best bourbon into the pot of clam chowder being prepared for dinner, saying, “Now you’ll hear some speeches!”

A Philadelphia cardinal who had attended both the 50th and 75th anniversaries presided at the 100th. Soon-to-be-Archbishop Fulton Sheen (then teaching at Catholic University) spoke. He called his homily “The Thunder of Silence,” and included lyrical phrases to describe the monks like: “The hands that toil in the fields are the hands in which the Word has become flesh.”

To honor the big occasion, Merton prepared—without attribution—a lovely commemorative book. He also kept a low profile and spent most of the celebration trying to avoid autograph seekers while the monks served refreshments on the lawn and hosted a luncheon inside for special guests.

Some folks think monks are dull, unimaginative, socially-awkward men. After almost two centuries in America, however, and based on some personal experience and research, it seems pretty clear to me that Trappists—especially those at Gethsemani Abbey—know how to throw a party.

I cannot wait to see what the good Kentucky monks come up with for their 175th birthday this year.

*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.