Trappist community in Huntsville is dwindling

Friday, Sep. 04, 2015

The Order of Cistercians of Strict Observance was a 17th-century reform of the original Cistercian order founded in 1098. It is popularly known as the Trappists, after its abbey at La Trappe, France. Although its rule was among the strictest among Catholic religious orders, including silence, a vegetarian diet, hard work, prayer and penance, the order attracted many followers and spread into many countries.

The most famous Trappist community in the United States is Gethsemane in Kentucky, which experienced a veritable explosion of new vocations during and after World War II.  

That expansion can be explained by at least two factors: the horrors of the war itself, which seemed to many to contradict any pretensions secular society may have had to be able to create a humane civilization; and Thomas Merton, who entered Gethsemane at the beginning of the war and penned a most compelling explanation of his decision in his 1948 bestselling autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain.” By the late 1940s Gethsemane was so overpopulated that it became necessary for it to send sister houses to other parts of the country. One of those was created in Utah.

The Most Rev. Duane G. Hunt, the fifth Bishop of Salt Lake City who was instrumental in bringing a good number of religious orders, both cloistered and secular, to Utah, also played a major role in securing the Trappists. The Trappists like to find remote, isolated locations for their monasteries, where they can pursue their agricultural livelihood and quiet lives of prayer with minimal distraction. Bishop Hunt located an ideal site for them in a high mountain valley east of Ogden near the small community of Huntsville. The Trappists erected what they might have considered temporary quarters (though they became permanent) out of some war surplus Quonset huts and moved here in 1947. They called their foundation the Abbey of the Holy Trinity.

For a time, as Trappist vocations continued to flow in, the abbey flourished. Their 1,800 acres of prime farming and grazing land enabled them to prosper, not only to provide for their own needs, but also to offer bread and other products for sale in their gift shop.  Eventually the community swelled to 80 members.

Life at the abbey, though, was difficult. Those Quonset huts provided only token protection from Huntsville’s subzero winter temperatures, and the grueling work in the fields in the thin mountain air and broiling summer sun took an equal toll. The monks pray a total of seven daily offices in the Liturgy of the Hours, beginning at 3:30 a.m., and sustain themselves by only two daily vegetarian meals. For whatever reasons – the rigors of their daily routine, or the general decline in religious vocations that set in at about the time of the Second Vatican Council – the Trappist community has for a long time been in a state of decline. Their last vocation in Utah came in 1985, and the members have gradually grown elderly.

Today the community numbers only a little over a dozen members, all of whom are too elderly to work the land. They support themselves by leasing out some of their farmland, by a shop that produces woodworking products, by proceeds from the sale of religious goods, and by donations and investments. Much of their physical work is done by volunteers between the ages of 18 and 50 who pledge themselves to the same daily schedule as the monks for a period of one year with the possibility of indefinite renewals. Several years ago the monks made plans to erect a beautiful modern facility and even began fundraising efforts to support it, but the project eventually died, and the future of Holy Trinity Abbey is uncertain.

What is not uncertain, yet unquantifiable, is the benefit the monastery has provided for the diocese. Many Utah Catholics have attended retreats there, sought spiritual counseling and confessions, and benefitted in untold ways from the prayers of the Trappists. If and when the abbey fails, the diocese will have lost one of its major spiritual underpinnings.