Fr. Alan Hohl: Utah’s Trappist Bud

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Most people knew him as Father Alan. Originally, however, he was Francis Joseph Hohl, born in Chicago in 1926 and raised in Rib Lake, Wisconsin, a small town about halfway between Green Bay and Duluth. His family called him “Bud.”

Three of his four grandparents were immigrants from Germany. One grandfather was a Wisconsin farmer and the other a Chicago baker. His father Francis Ambrose Hohl farmed and also worked in the nearby lumber mill. Bud’s mother Theresa Herrman Hohl kept the house.

Young Bud Hohl loved baseball and boxing, but one of his greatest interests was in becoming a Catholic priest. He was friends with the clerics from the Society of the Precious Blood—founded in 1815 by Italian Saint Gaspar—who staffed his hometown parish. The kind priests took him fishing and hiking.

Bud enjoyed both activities, but also fell in love with flying. He took a high school course in aviation and built dozens of model airplanes. On December 7, 1941, while sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the radio, and working on a model P-39, he learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Bud put his plans for the priesthood on hold. As soon as he graduated from high school in 1944, he joined the U.S. Navy and started training to be a pilot. Bud was grateful that the terrible war ended while he was still in training. He once told me, “Thanks be to God, I didn’t have to shoot anybody or drop any bombs on anybody.”

He was actively involved in the Cold War that followed World War II. The Navy assigned him to the Aleutian Islands. He flew patrol planes checking for potential enemy ships and submarines in the sea-lanes near Alaska. While there, Bud lived in Quonset huts.

After the military discharged him in 1949, he was poised to join the Precious Blood priests when a friend suggested he take a look at the Trappists. Bud visited and then joined the Northern Utah monastery in 1953. He took on the religious name of “Alan.”

Why Huntsville instead of another abbey? It was the Quonset hut building, the same type of structure he lived in during his Navy years. Father Alan recalled, “I loved that building.”

I met him when I was just a kid visiting the monastery in the 1970s. I remember this big strong man who used to carry huge metal pipes on his shoulders and run from one watering site to another. While managing the irrigation and water systems on the monastery’s 1,800 acre farm, he even caught a trout with a backhoe (see: A monk fish story).

That same big strong man also had one of the most gentle and angelic singing voices I ever heard. Anyone who heard the Utah monks sing also heard Father Alan. He was the monastery’s cantor. He also worked with his friend (and fellow monk) Father Baldwin Shea and with Sister Cecile Gertken, a Benedictine nun and expert on Gregorian chant, to translate and reset the entire monastery Psalter from Latin to English. The three collaborators had fun too, naming their little “musical group” the “ABCs”…for “Alan/Baldwin/Cecile” (see: Making Monk Music).

Despite his life as a cloistered monk, Father Alan had hundreds of good friends. He was close with Edger Allen, the Huntsville town water manager, and spoke at Edger’s Latter-day Saint funeral. He took flights with Ed Rich, a neighbor/pilot who let the monk fly with him when Father Alan had to “check the abbey’s fence lines,” including once to verify that none of those fence lines extended to southwestern Wyoming.

He was civic-minded too. He joined Huntsville Mayor Jim Truett and spoke up for the town at a community improvement grants board meeting. The board members teared up as they recounted their past interactions with the Trappist monk on water issues. And yes, the town won the grant.

Father Alan led the morning prayers at the town park in 2017 to kick off the Huntsville July 4th festivities. Later that same day—along with two other fellow Trappists—Father Alan served as the annual parade’s grand marshal.

When the Utah monastery closed in August 2017, Father Alan had to leave behind the only home he had known/loved for over a half century. I’d have understood if he had complained to me afterwards, but that never happened. Instead, he told me that his simple apartment in a Salt Lake City retirement home was like a palace.

While there, he loved to say Mass each morning in his small apartment chapel, with his fellow monks Father David Altman and Father Patrick Boyle. He also looked forward to swapping monastic life stories with Gethsemani Abbey monk Brother Columban Weber, who was in Utah too temporarily.

Father Alan enjoyed a few of the more secular benefits of the place too. One day Father Alan exclaimed with surprise and delight, “Mike, every time I open my apartment refrigerator, there is a beer right there!” I helped stock it from time to time…and always with Trappist beer.

Even during his tenth and final decade of life, Father Alan had a way of connecting with people who were many years younger than him.

He regaled my twenty-something nieces (also pilots) with flying stories (see: Monks and Millennials). His eyes lit up when new monastery landowner Bill White described the current state of the irrigation system. His mouth watered whenever Bill’s wife Alane served up her homemade potato salad.

My wife Vicki adored him. She made sure he had a constant supply of the hand cream she also used. He had tried it once and proclaimed it the “best ever.”

One time I introduced Father Alan to a young family friend, Louis Franciose, who is studying to be a Benedictine monk (see: The Once and Future Monk). The old monk was thrilled to meet a young man following in his vocational footsteps. He told Louis—now Brother Basil—that the Huntsville monastery gave him “a beautiful life.”

When I heard Father Alan’s words, I could not help but think that the monastery also gave all the rest of us a beautiful man.

For a Trappist, death is not a sad event, but the fulfillment of a lifelong yearning for a deeper relationship with God. Trappists are not morbid and do not actively seek out death. When it arrives, however, they do not fear it as an enemy, but instead welcome it as a beloved brother.

Father Alan graced many lives for 95 years, and then he embraced Brother Death and passed into Heaven on December 16, 2021. His spirit will continue to grace us for many more years to come.

In the book New Seeds of Contemplation, famous Kentucky Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote, “The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.”

All those blossoming saints started off as buds. Just like Utah’s Trappist Bud.

*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