The 100-year-old monk

St. Bernard's Father Schnurr reaches the century mark

Friday, November 09, 2007

By KAY CAMPBELL
Times Faith & Values Editor, kay.campbell@htimes.com

Father Thomas Schnurr, who turns 100 Sunday, remembers what St. Bernard's Abbey was like when he arrived as an 11-year-old boy in 1918.

He remembers Brother Joseph Zoettl, the monk who created the amazing miniature buildings in the grotto that made the monastery world famous. He remembers the horse-drawn wagons in Cullman, how the fire chief's equipment consisted of only a hat. How he respected the priests and was one of the small group of boys at the school determined to join the order when they grew up.

In fact, Schnurr's memory seems to fail only the way every priest's memory is supposed to fail: in the remembrance of any troubles of his own and of sins of his parishioners.

"I remember the Justice of the Peace came by about 9:30 one Monday morning," Schnurr said last week as he reminisced in his tiny room in the infirmary at the monastery. His story came from one of the times when he also served as a priest for Cullman.

"He told me he had a man in jail, but if I would get him to sign a pledge not to drink for two weeks, he'd let him out," Schnurr said. "So I got him to sign it."

And did the man keep his part of the deal?

"I don't know," Schnurr said, laughing. "I forgot."

'A regular life'

Schnurr has no particular health problems, beyond weakness when he tries to walk and ears that don't hear so well. He lives in the infirmary where he has help to get dressed or be wheeled to Mass, where he sits in contemplation in the sun-drenched sandstone chapel, built in a modern style with soaring columns and a high arched ceiling made of planks cut from the abbey's forests.

In Schnurr's room, twists of wire holders hold a wooden crucifix to a wire conduit over his sink. His small desk's one shelf is lined with books about the Bible, theology, and David McCullough's "The Great Bridge," which, he says, has "too much politics in it."

His clothes hang on a three-foot rod: his black monk's cassock, three shirts and a jacket. His narrow bed is covered with a hand-crocheted cover made for the abbey. A tiny television sits on a cabinet, a set used, he said, to watch baseball or football.

His relatives just sent his only other piece of furniture, a comfortable arm chair that has a seat that will lift to help him get to his feet.

The only valuable possessions Schnurr owns are the stories of his long and peaceful life. Schnurr has been at St. Bernard's since he was 11. Until he took orders, he returned to his home in Louisville, Ky., to visit his family during vacations. He took his master's degree and did doctoral work at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. His doctoral work was on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who taught a "philosophy of reality, not idealism," Schnurr said.

After Schnurr became a priest, sometimes he was assigned to cover parishes in the Southeast that were between priests, but mostly he has lived and taught at the monastery, where life moves from prayer to prayer between the six formal times of prayer of the Benedictine day.

"It was a good life," Schnurr said, leaning forward as he talked, his forehead lined only with a nearly invisible mesh of tiny wrinkles. "We did our work. We always had something to eat. We didn't have to worry."

"It's a regular life, and we all worked together."

Schnurr paused and regarded his visitor through undimmed eyes.

"See what I mean?" he demanded, sounding as he must have sounded during lectures in his classroom.

Learning on the side

 Abbott Cletus Meagher remembers Father Schnurr as a teacher from his own days as a student at St. Bernard's, which had a college until 1979. Schnurr taught Latin, Greek, German, philosophy and music.

Abbott Meagher remembers how the students loved to try to get Father Schnurr off the subject so they wouldn't have to translate Greek. "I remember once, from a three-word sentence, we got him to talking about everything from harvesting strawberries to tanning hides," Meagher said last week as he ate soup and a sandwich in the abbey refractory.

Schnurr still loves to talk about the work monks would do in the days when the monastery was completely self-sufficient, from the hogs grown to be butchered and made into food laid on tables monks had built from their own lumber, felled from the vast forest around the abbey. Schnurr thought those lessons were at least as important as ancient Greek, so much so that he made points from those digressions into "bene's," extra credit questions added to his tests.

"It was always something we had talked about on the side," said Schnurr, who has also worked as the abbey's archivist. "At least in my class, things often went off on the side."

The bits on the side are what Kevin Dillon remembers most about the philosophy classes he took from Father Schnurr. Dillon and other members of the classes from 1955 to 1966 who had returned to St. Bernard's for a week of work last week. Dillon joined others re-setting and white-washing the rows of simple crosses that mark the graves of monks and priests in a small cemetery beside the abbey.

"None of us wanted it (philosophy class), but we all got it," Dillon said as he pushed Schnurr's wheelchair over the grass of the cemetery. "He gave us the basic foundations of life. And he was great on Christian apologetics -all that stuff about the church that probably they don't teach now."

'Living the paradox'

Father Schnurr's life has been spent teaching, studying, praying, or working on the grounds of the abbey.
His love of the forest still lights his face when his wheelchair is pushed outside.

"Look at that tree," Schnurr said, pointing at a dogwood in burgundy smolder beside a building. "Isn't it
beautiful!"

"And look, look at that tree, isn't it terrible?" he said, pointing to an oak with clumps of mistletoe high in bare branches. "Look -that's what mistletoe does. That's what's killing that tree -you understand?"

Schnurr worked at managing the forest when he wasn't teaching.

"You never run out of work in the woods," he said.

Schnurr's has been a life of the freedom found in confinement and discipline, where life is regulated by prayer and silence reigns for most of the day, said Abbey Meagher. And Schnurr has been one of the monks to make the most of the contained infinity of monasticism.

"I think the stability of such a life is a great gift to us," Meagher said. "We live in the paradox: We come to life by dying to life, by living in community."

"I think Father Tom is one of the living saints in our house," Meagher said. "There is a joy about him -he doesn't see himself as a memorable character, but people remember him. In the good sense of the word, he goes by the book. He is a man of discipline."

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