Could Latter-day Saint missionaries help save Catholic monasteries in the United States?

A question that may seem absurd at first merits further contemplation: Could missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints help save the Catholic monastic movement in the United States?

I have great affection for monks. Their recent decline in numbers saddens me. I explain why in my 2021 memoir, “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” about growing up at an old Trappist monastery in Huntsville.

Having lived in Utah for six decades, I also know that a Latter-day Saint missionary is monklike. A mission involves community living, lots of prayer, and stepping away from “normal” life.

Years ago, Latter-day Saint men often prepared for missions with weekend retreats at the Huntsville monastery. My friend, former Church Historian LeGrand R. Curtis Jr., walked the peaceful grounds with me just a few months before his own second mission, in Rome.

In many ways, the Latter-day Saint missionary system is an exemplar for us Catholics. At least one other blogger shares my holy envy for the program.

The writer said he’d like to ask Pope Francis this question: “How different do you think the world would be if every Catholic young person aspired to serve a two-year mission like Mormon young people do?”

A call to service

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops should create a national service program that — among other things — would bring young Catholics into close contact with monks. My friend Bill White gets the credit for this great idea.

Bill — a fellow lawyer and friend of the Utah monks — served a Latter-day Saint mission in California. While he established the conservation easement that saved the monks’ Ogden Valley farmland, Bill also saw that the abbey had struggled to show young people how a monk lives a wonderful life.

He has told me, and several monastic leaders, that if young Catholic missionaries were assigned to do service work for a year or two at monasteries, not only would it help aging monks, but it also likely would call some of those young folks to monastic life.

Bill is on to something.

Young Catholics are generous with their time. My children performed hundreds of service hours for worthy nonprofit groups while attending Utah’s Catholic schools.

Catholics do have mission programs, such as the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) missionaries. Unfortunately, not many young Catholics join them, and they don’t really help monasteries.

Latter-day Saints could teach Catholics how to organize and operate a nationwide mission program with widespread participation. Instead of a geographic focus, however, a national Catholic missionary program could zero in on meeting various human needs.

There could be a hunger track for working at inner-city soup kitchens, such as St. Vincent de Paul Dining Hall in Salt Lake City. Other missionaries could help with refugee resettlement at Catholic Community Services in Utah.

And some young Catholic missionaries could be assigned to help aging monks and nuns at their monasteries. That assignment might foster the same type of fascinating intergenerational dialogue I watched recently when Utah’s old Trappist monks met some millennials 60 or 70 years younger than them.

Meeting the monks

After the Huntsville monastery closed in 2017, the surviving monks (in their 80s and 90s) moved to a retirement community in Salt Lake City. Sometimes my wife, Vicki, and I drove them back to see their old abbey and enjoy a barbecue with Bill and Alane White.

One summer, my daughter and three nieces — then all in their 20s — joined us. I knew my young kin would be polite to the much older monks, but I was surprised at how quickly other bonds developed.

It started with basic kindness. The young folks assisted the monks in and out of cars, with their walkers and canes, and in moving around.

After helping the old men get their lunch, instead of burying their faces in their cellphones, the millennials sat down and ate lunch with the monks. They chatted about their work and lives.

The monks asked questions and told jokes. One monk shared a TikTok video someone had sent him, describing the three most difficult things for people to say: “I’m sorry, I love you, and Worcestershire sauce.”

My nieces, who are pilots, shared flight stories with Father Alan Hohl, who was a Navy pilot. He told them he missed flying but had enjoyed “a wonderful life as a monk.”

The young folks were touched. “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life,” my niece Kaylin said, “but no matter the journey, I just hope I can have that same contentment and gratefulness when I reflect back on my life the way Father Alan does.”

Nuns & Nones

Bill’s idea about a missionary program for monks also reminds me of the Nuns & Nones program, which brings together aged Catholic nuns with millennials who check the “none” survey box regarding religious affiliation yet who also yearn for a spiritual life.

The two groups inevitably find common ground.

In a 2019 article, a none said, “We millennials…hunger for spaces of community, belonging, meaning, depth, and we aren’t finding [them]. …And so to be able to find that with these Catholic sisters who hold wisdom of their traditions from centuries is a gift for us.”

A participating nun said, “I’m deeply impressed with [the nones’] wanting to make the world a better place, with their questions, with what they’re seeking. That’s not any different from what I’m seeking or we’re seeking.”

There’s reason for both gloom and hope about the current state of decline in American monastic life. Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister says it is like grieshog, an Irish practice of burying warm coals under ashes to preserve the embers in order to start a fire the next morning.

She believes it is “a holy process, this preservation of purpose, of energy, of warmth and light in darkness. What we call death and end and loss in our lives, as one thing turns into another, may, in these terms, be better understood as grieshog, as the preservation of the coals. As refusing to go cold.”

Could Latter-day Saint missionaries help ignite those embers and start the next monastic fire?

It’s a heartwarming thought.

Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who frequently represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. His book “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” about growing up with the monks at an old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, was published by Paraclete Press and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best nonfiction book in 2022. He blogs at theboymonk.com.

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