An old brick ranch house stands near the entrance to St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass. The monks reside in cloisters located about a mile down the gravel road.
In the cradle of the Capitol Creek Valley, surrounded by shrubby mesas, dense forests and sweeping mountain views, St. Benedict’s Monastery occupies one of the largest and most revered parcels of privately owned land in the Roaring Fork Valley.
More than 3,700 deeded acres are sparsely developed, the historic green-brick cloisters and a contemporary retreat center secluded by the rolling landscape. Cattle graze in sprawling hayfields. Coyotes howl to the sound of church bells. Elk and deer traipse among the hills, sometimes using the monastery as a place of rest, too.
But “it’s not just the natural corridors and the wildlife migration spheres and the beautiful buildings, … not just the lifestyle lived there,” according to Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest and writer who has long communed with the Catholic monks of St. Benedict’s.
“There is a spiritual current there, and I’m not just talking sort of ‘woo-hoo,’ ‘new age’ stuff,” Bourgeault said. “People that I know, who are sober, lucid and skeptical, go out and stand on that ground and say, ‘Whoa’ — that there is a genuine transmission of the values that live there.”
The monks have stewarded this land for the better part of seven decades, caring deeply for the patchwork of property they largely acquired from Catholic ranching families and neighboring philanthropists. The chapel and monks’ quarters were built by hand in the mid-1950s, designed to last hundreds of years. The new retreat center was designed with a similar lifespan in mind. The monks’ philosophy of “ora et labora,” Latin for prayer and work, dates back 1,500 years to St. Benedict himself, whose book of precepts became the foundation of Western monastic life.
“And the prayer is there, not just only in the chapel buildings, but in the fences and the ranches and the stockyards and the hay that they raised,” Bourgeault said.
Father Thomas Keating reads in the library of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass, circa 1980. The renowned spiritual leader was a pioneer in the practice of “centering prayer” and a cofounder of the international organization Contemplative Outreach.
Charismatic religious leaders such as Father Thomas Keating and Father Joseph Boyle also cultivated a rich spiritual community in Snowmass, shepherding thousands of visitors into a lifestyle of contemplation.
Keating was a pioneer of “centering prayer,” a practice akin to silent meditation that is rooted in Christian tradition with a focus on receiving the presence of God. He sprouted an international movement through his lectures, writings, workshops and retreats, and he was a founding member of Contemplative Outreach, which now serves more than 40,000 people in 39 countries. Keating also spearheaded a series of interreligious conferences in Snowmass, welcoming leaders of vastly different faiths to the monastery for intimate and intellectual conversations about belief and meaning.
Boyle was part of that movement, too, studying as a postulant under Keating’s leadership before ascending to the role of superior himself. He served as abbot of St. Benedict’s for 33 years, with a penchant for hospitality and a “complete compassion and gentleness,” Bourgeault said. He also oversaw several major updates to monastery grounds, including a glistening retreat center that opened in 1995 (funded by a multimillion-dollar capital campaign) and the addition of an infirmary for aging and ailing monks in 2000.
“I called it a monastic Camelot,” Bourgeault said. “It was like everything was beautiful.”
Boyle died of cancer at the monastery Oct. 21, 2018. Keating died four days later, after years of declining health, at the “mother house”: St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. The monks at St. Benedict’s have continued to serve a large flock of spiritual visitors, but their own community of religious brothers keeps getting smaller, and older.
St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass, Colorado, is pictured on Thursday. The 3,700-acre property is now on the market for $150 million as the religious institution faces a dwindling population of monks. Past efforts to preserve the land never came to fruition — but some local groups hope a collaboration might help.
Then, in 2022, higher monastic authorities initiated the process to close St. Benedict’s. The retreat center and bookstore shuttered last year. And this spring, the property hit the market for $150 million.
“It didn’t come as a shock to me, but it has affected me so, so deeply in my heart,” said Steve Child, a Pitkin County commissioner who has lived next to the monastery almost as long as the monks have been there. “They’ve been like the best neighbors I can [imagine]. They’ve been there my whole life, since I was 14 years old, and to have them not be there, to me, is just incomprehensible.”
Other neighbors and monastery patrons have expressed a similar spectrum of emotion, something akin to grief. They feel sorrow, dismay, bewilderment and anger. And they are intensely concerned about the future of the place, which some have called a “sacred valley” and a “cathedral of nature.” (It is also, from a practical standpoint, an agricultural resource, with more than 1,000 acres leased for cattle grazing; the water rights, enough to irrigate as many as 1,500 acres, date back more than a century.)
Given the nine-figure listing, some believe the best-case scenario for St. Benedict’s may be a benevolent billionaire; the worst-case, a land-hungry real estate speculator.
But another possibility — collaborative partnerships — has given hope to many community members who want to preserve the monastery’s legacy and protect the land in perpetuity.
Calling themselves the Friends of the Monastery, a coalition of prominent Roaring Fork Valley residents have sought to wield their expertise and influence in pursuit of just such a solution. This past summer, after more than a year of brainstorming and kitchen-table meetings, they formalized their status as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization eligible to receive tax-deductible donations. They see themselves primarily as advocates in pursuit of a common goal: to conserve open space and maintain spiritual traditions while still maximizing revenue for the monks.
The gravestones of Father Thomas Keating and Father Joseph Boyle are side-by-side in the cemetery at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass, pictured on Thursday. The charismatic religious leaders died four days apart in 2018.
A hole in the “tapestry of conservation”
The listing, represented by the Mirr Ranch Group, identifies St. Benedict’s as an “excellent opportunity for conservation,” and the agent, Ken Mirr, specializes in legacy ranches and properties with large swaths of open space. He spent much of his early career as a public-lands attorney, facilitating leases and land exchanges, and has served on the boards of multiple land trusts dedicated to conservation; many of Mirr’s listings market the “conservation value” of the property, and he has sold some ranches that are already protected by easements.
Mirr said the monks’ stewardship has essentially “locked that monastery in a vault” since they settled there in 1956; he intends to find a buyer who respects the ecological values of the region and understands Pitkin County’s restrictive land-use policies. The property is zoned for potential subdivision into scores of 30-acre parcels, but those lots would lack the development rights to build almost any new structure — and the review process to secure those rights is time-consuming and competitive, with added costs to boot. Mirr believes that “the right person will arrive when they understand what is entailed in buying this.”
“For the monastery — you know, they’re my client,” he said. “I am trying to get them the highest and best number I can for them so they can go out there and then spread their message worldwide.”
At the same time, Mirr said, he doesn’t want to create some “PR nightmare,” either for the Snowmass monks who are deeply connected to the land or for the Catholic Church of which they are a part.
Still, there is no guarantee the land will be permanently protected without a formal conservation easement, which would sterilize it from development to maintain scenic and ecological values.
The monastery has been a target for conservation since at least the 1990s, pegged as one of the “big four” ranches in the Capitol Creek Valley that could be guarded from most future development and preserved as rural, agricultural land.
Over the subsequent decades, the Child, Harvey and McBride families all secured easements on their properties. Their partnerships with Pitkin County and the Aspen Valley Land Trust border a vast swath of already-protected public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
The monks have shown support for their neighbors’ efforts and have engaged in discussions with both the county and AVLT about their own conservation prospects. Yet, an easement at the monastery never came to fruition, and the current price is far out of reach for either land agency to execute an outright acquisition as a single buyer.
“It’s a spectacular tapestry of conservation, and the hole in the middle of it is the monastery,” said Chelsea Congdon, an environmentalist and founding member of the Friends of the Monastery.
So long as the monks have lived in Old Snowmass, though, “it didn’t feel like a hole” because of their relationship with the land, Congdon said.
A shelter protects bales of hay at St. Benedict’s Monastery on Thursday. The monastery has enough water rights to irrigate as many as 1,500 acres, though they typically irrigate closer to 1,200 acres.
In several books about St. Benedict’s, the late Father William Meninger described a philosophy of coexistence with the natural world rather than domination over it — an “ecological balance in which men and women take their rightful share … in which they work together with all creation.” The monastery’s neighbors, albeit not bound to the same religious codes, have followed much the same approach.
“The beauty of Old Snowmass is that it is, by and large, lightly lived on,” Congdon said. “And when you get to the end of the Capitol Creek Valley, marvelously conserved, and there is the monastery in the heart of it — until this moment, [it was] assumed to be conserved because they’re monks, and they’re going to leave it that way.”
Hence, her concerns about potential buyers of the property: “Now, it matters who gets the monastery.”
The monks have considered this prospect and have made several attempts to preserve the character of their land and the surrounding valley in collaboration with local partners.
About 1994, “concerned about the pace of housing and commercial development in the area, the monks joined with three other adjacent landowners to insure protection from developers,” Father Micah Schonberger wrote in a coffee-table book that Meninger also authored, called “St. Benedict’s Monastery: Snowmass, Colorado” (2005). “They attempted an agreement to keep their combined 10,000 or more acres rural and agricultural. Due to inevitable complexities, 10 years of legal negotiations ended with no resolution.”
Separate efforts led to conservation easements on more than 7,700 surrounding acres — led, in large part, by Dale Will of Pitkin County Open Space and Trails.
He had the “big four” ranches on his punch list when he was first hired by the county as executive director of the program in 1999, and he helped Pitkin County secure conservation easements of the Child and Harvey ranches in the mid-2000s through collaborations with the Aspen Valley Land Trust. The McBrides would seal the deal about a decade and a half later, ultimately donating two conservation easements to AVLT.
“But this whole time, we were wondering about the monastery,” said Will, who now serves as the department’s acquisition and special projects director. An easement on the monastery could preserve wildlife habitat, migration corridors and scenic open space, as well as agricultural land; it would also lock in historic water rights, so they couldn’t be sold off to “somewhere else,” Will said.
Icicles form on the main building of St. Benedict’s Monastery, where the chapel and monks’ quarters are located. The building is only open to the public during daily liturgical services.
A conservation proposal
The St. Benedict’s property is like a “keystone” in the network of conserved lands, Will said, and the fact that it remains a hole in that system limits the ecological benefit that all the other properties can provide.
“If you build a house and you’ve only got three of the walls up and the fourth is missing, the house is worth a lot less,” he said. “If you’ve got the four walls, then you’ve really got something. … Getting a complete set of the big ranches out there actually makes each of those conservation easements more valuable.
“And in contrast, if the monastery were to be densely developed, it would degrade the things that we were trying to accomplish on the neighboring ranches.”
So, Will continued to work with the monks on conservation proposals; there were several occasions when he felt he was gaining traction, including a series of meetings with then-Abbot Charles Albanese and Brother Raymond Roberts in 2020. (Roberts is the longtime ranch manager at St. Benedict’s. As Cynthia Bourgeault noted, “Brother Raymond, I think, personally, has walked every single inch — worked, had his hands in the dirt, ranched — I don’t think there’s a pebble in that monastery that he doesn’t know.”)
As those conversations progressed, Will looked into other monasteries that had conserved their properties, and compiled a thoroughly researched packet for the monks to consider that summer. By the spring of 2022, Open Space and Trails had procured a conservation appraisal and developed a draft proposal for an easement.
A monk reads to the community of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass during a meal in 1966. Others listened in silence.
That proposal from Pitkin County, provided in response to a Colorado Open Records Act request, would have secured a conservation easement on the central 2,700-acre “bowl” of the monastery property, valued at about $27 million. (The total was intended to represent the difference between the dollar value of unencumbered property and the lower price that would result if the land were sterilized from development.)
The county could provide nearly $16 million in cash, and the remaining $11 million would be treated like a donation — split up over two years — to utilize Colorado’s transferable tax credit program. The program is designed to incentivize conservation: 90% of the donated value — $10 million, in this case — could be claimed in tax credits that may be sold slightly below face value.
Eight small areas within the bowl would be reserved for monastery activity, and the remainder of the property would still be unrestricted, with some potential for future development within Pitkin County land-use rules. The county would own the easement, but the monks would still own the land.
It would have been a “bargain sale,” given the combination of cash and donations proposed, but Will hoped it would still be an attractive pitch because of the charitable benefits provided to the community and because of the lucrative state tax credits.
Will said the monks verbally acknowledged receipt of the proposal from April 2022, but “we never got a written response to that offer, which, frankly, was disappointing, because we worked pretty extensively with Father Charlie and Brother Raymond, putting that offer together.”
“The conservation easement design, … that was all at their direction,” Will added. “So I understood there could be a negotiation around the money, but I thought we already had kind of a tacit agreement about the concept.”
Pitkin County continues to circle property acquisitions and interest in the Capitol Creek Valley; the matter has been a topic of discussion in severalrecentexecutive sessions by the Open Space and Trails Board, but the closed-meeting agendas and minutes don’t identify which specific parcels are up for discussion.
And although the county hasn’t shied away from big-ticket purchases, those transactions are rare and can depend on significant support from other partners. Their $34 million acquisition of the 650-acre Snowmass Falls Ranch this year was far larger than any other purchase in the history of the program; in order to restore some financial capacity to the Open Space and Trails department, the county secured a $10 million loan from Great Outdoors Colorado.
“We’re not in a position to purchase the land” at St. Benedict’s outright, Will said. But if monastery representatives decided to respond now — or sometime in the future — he’d be willing to come back to the table and negotiate an easement.
The retreat center at St. Benedict’s Monastery opened in 1995, serving as a new hub for visitors seeking deep contemplation in Old Snowmass. The monastery stopped hosting retreats in 2023 amid a lengthy closure process, but monks have continued to offer daily mass.
Monastic hierarchy calls the shots
Ultimately, the decision wasn’t for the Snowmass monks to make.
They are subject to the constitution of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, or OCSO, with a General Chapter of abbots and abbesses that functions as the “supreme authority” of more than 80 Trappist monasteries and nearly 70 nunneries worldwide, as of 2023. The chapter meets every three years to strengthen bonds of the order and make decisions. The Snowmass monks are also subject to direction from an elected abbot general who oversees the entire order and from their “father immediate” — in this case, the abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer.
The abbey is considered the “mother house” of St. Benedict’s, as it first dispatched monks to Snowmass to establish a new monastery in early 1956 and served as a starting point for some of St. Benedict’s best-known spiritual leaders, including Keating.
“Why Snowmass?”: St. Joseph’s was fast approaching a population of more than 180 religious brothers in the mid-1950s, and its growth prompted leaders to establish several new monasteries. As recounted in a Rocky Mountain News feature from the following winter, the abbot in Spencer had sent a team out west in search of a place that would align with the “severity” of the Trappist lifestyle and offer the requisite detachment from society; when he visited Snowmass, he was “awed by the setting.”
Moreover, as a Catholic monastery, St. Benedict’s must abide by canon law and submit to other church authorities, including the local Archdiocese of Denver and the Holy See, also known as the Vatican.
This hierarchy, outlined in the OCSO constitution, is backed by the monks’ vow of obedience. And that commitment is framed as a spiritual value — a signal of Christ-like commitment to their faith and practice, much like their vows of stability and fidelity to monastic life.
So, it was a decision by the Trappist order and its General Chapter that ultimately stymied the conservation effort in 2022.
“The offer of Pitkin County arrived just as the community’s discernment of its future was accelerating,” St. Joseph’s Abbot Vincent Rogers wrote in an email. Facing a declining and aging population at St. Benedict’s, “all attention was turned to the next step in its discernment process” to determine whether the monastery could continue to exist as a community.
Amid these “urgent matters,” the General Chapter decided “to put on hold the question of a conservation easement and Pitkin County’s proposal,” Rogers wrote.
Following procedures outlined in the Cistercian constitution and a related statute, the order had evaluated the circumstances at St. Benedict’s and had taken steps to suspend the monastery’s decision-making autonomy. The General Chapter would ultimately vote to close the facility during their triennial meeting that September —- considering such “elements of fragility” as the number of monks, their age profile, and whether the buildings are suitable for the current community.
The number of monks at St. Benedict’s has fluctuated several times over its history, with both steep declines and surges of new membership. But in recent years, there was no monastic revival: The monks’ community shrank from 18 members in 2009 to 10 members in 2022, according to OCSO data. It would get even smaller the next year, with seven members remaining in 2023.
Meanwhile, their population — which ranged in age from 30 to 88 as recently as 2019, according to a website managed by Trappist brothers and sisters — began to skew heavily toward the far end of the age spectrum as some of the younger brothers moved on from St. Benedict’s.
On July 29, 2022, Albanese officially resigned as abbot of St. Benedict’s for “personal reasons,” according to an announcement on the OCSO website. At Rogers’ request, the abbot general suspended the autonomy of Snowmass — one of many steps outlined in the statute to address a fragile community and potentially “suppress,” or close, the monastery.
In turn, a new superior would take the helm at Snowmass: Father Damian Carr, former abbot of St. Joseph’s in Spencer, was appointed to serve as monastic commissary of Snowmass. The position is designated to care for a fragile community, to keep them informed and to hear their opinions on “matters of importance”; the monastic commissary has limited authority and reports regularly to the father immediate.
The cloisters of St. Benedict’s Monastery include a chapel, meditation room, monks’ quarters and an abbot’s office, as well as a kitchen and space for communal meals.
If a monastery shows signs of improvement, it may regain its autonomous status. But if, “due to particular and long-standing circumstances, a monastery no longer offers any basis for hope of growth, careful consideration is given to whether it should be closed,” the statute states. A “conventual chapter” of local monks may also express that they have accepted this reality through a unanimous vote.
The General Chapter voted to close the Snowmass monastery at their September 2022 meeting in alignment with constitutional procedure. A Commission of Closure would be established to supervise the process, according to the statutes of the Order.
Rogers wrote that “the Order decided not to initiate a conservation easement on any part of the property, but to leave that option for the eventual buyer.”
The monastery initiated talks with Mirr, the real estate agent, around the spring of 2023. He said his first contact was with Albanese and Roberts, then their higher-ups in Spencer, including Rogers; they kept in touch for nearly a year before finalizing the agreement.
The listing hit the market this April. It was not entirely unexpected, at least for those who had been following the changes at the monastery, but it still prompted questions about what might happen to the land and the monks who still live on it.
On behalf of the St. Benedict’s monks, Albanese declined a request for an interview, deferring to information provided by Rogers in Spencer. The order’s procurator general, who conducts the business of the order under the authority of the abbot general, declined to comment on matters related to “individual monasteries” and did not respond to multiple follow-up requests related to general procedure.
Although the closure of St. Benedict’s is now underway, “it is a long process,” Rogers wrote.
“The small community at Snowmass continues to live their monastic life — prayers, work, community life.”
Eventually, though, the property will be sold, and the remaining monks will be transferred to other Trappist monasteries. They will have some choice in their destination, according to Rogers, but those who wish to live out the rest of their lives at St. Benedict’s must hope for goodwill from multiple parties.
“Whether any monks are allowed to remain at Snowmass depends on the superior of the monastery to which they transfer and the buyer of their property,” Rogers wrote.
A large cross marks the cemetery at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass. Several of the monastery’s best-known spiritual leaders are buried there.
Visions for the future
The monks of Old Snowmass were aware that this fate might eventually arrive, according to Chuck McKenna, a former brother at St. Benedict’s who is now a counselor in Salida. He continued to visit the monastery after he left in 1990, and he stayed in touch with Boyle, who served as abbot from 1985 until his death in 2018.
“We started talking about that [closure and sale] as a possibility years before he died, and I actually made a proposal as to what could happen next,” McKenna said. He also served on a more recent committee with about a dozen people — retreat center staff, monastery patrons and other ex-monks — to develop an idea “for what Snowmass could look like if it did cease to be a monastery.”
Patricia Johnson, who led retreats at the monastery for decades with the nonprofit Contemplative Outreach of Colorado, was also part of that cohort. They met over the course of several months in 2020, when Albanese was still serving as abbot.
And their ideas ranged from a center for spiritual reflection to a hub for sustainable agriculture — even a trade school, focused on disciplines such as woodworking and ceramics, that could also incorporate the “Liturgy of the Hours,” a Catholic structure of public prayer.
“There was just so much wonderful, no-holds-barred stuff that the 12 of us talked about,” Johnson said. “It’s such a sacred place in the ‘sacred valley,’ and you feel it. You feel it the minute you turn the corner and drive in there.”
For Johnson, the ideal future is still one of conservation and renewed retreats, honoring the work already set in motion by Boyle and Albanese.
That’s not far off from the vision that the Friends of the Monastery have conceived on their own, drawing on the ideas and experiences of more than a dozen members with close ties to the monastery and the community.
In addition to Congdon, its membership includes Steve Child; the McBrides; environmentalist Tom Cardamone; former Pitkin County Community Development Director Cindy Houben; and open space advocates such as Tim McFlynn and rancher David Chase, who serves on the board of the Snowmass Capitol Creek Caucus. The group includes several others with locally familiar last names as well.
The Friends of the Monastery developed their own ideas for conservation, in hopes that a combination of easements and residential parcels would yield a high financial return for the Trappist order while preserving most of the land. According to an “offer to help” they compiled in October 2023, they also sought to maintain a spiritual use for the main monastery building and retreat center, and “enable any monks who wish to remain in their monastic community at St. Benedict’s to continue doing so for the rest of their lives.”
They even created a rough first draft of a land-use plan to leave the main monastic area “untouched,” and identified several potential homesites, which could range from 35 acres to hundreds of acres. Regardless of property size, owners could only build a single residence within a 5-acre “activity envelope” on each lot, surrounded by a conservation easement.
The Friends of the Monastery also proposed a new spiritual nonprofit — along the lines of a Snowmass Center for Contemplative Practice and Dialogue — that could offer public programs in the tradition of silent meditation and interreligious dialogues. Their concept evoked the writings of Pope Francis on the “Care for Our Common Home” and the urgent need to address climate change; they suggested ecological dialogues could find a home in Old Snowmass, too.
“I think as the world becomes more topsy-turvy, more frenetic and, frankly, more crazy, … we need places to turn all that off and just go inside and be silent for an hour or a day or a week, more than ever,” said John Bennett, a member of the Friends of the Monastery and a former mayor of Aspen. “And this valley kind of mirrors the rest of the world, in the way (that) the volume, metaphorically speaking, has been turned up in this valley.”
That value of contemplation and peaceful gathering has even been referenced — albeit tangentially — in Pitkin County approval documents for the retreat center and other facility updates in the 1990s. The county identified the monastery as an “essential community facility,” exempt from certain fees and growth-management building restrictions; it is land-use terminology, but Bennett finds it applicable in a broader sense for St. Benedict’s.
“I cannot imagine more essential public facilities, essential community facilities than those buildings,” Bennett said. “If we talk about what a community is and what holds a community together, those are powerful places that have affected a lot of people’s lives, and they have played a big role in the history of the valley.”
And, as Chase notes, the preexisting designation as an “essential community facility” and religious hub may clear the path for future uses that continue in the tradition of St. Benedict’s. (On the flip side, the approvals could also make it more difficult for a prospective buyer to transform those buildings for other purposes; a buyer who wishes to live in the retreat center, for instance, may still need to seek a “change of use” with the county.)
The Friends of the Monastery followed up their 2023 “offer to help” with a letter this March. The letter, addressed to Rogers and Carr, listed the vast expertise of the Friends of the Monastery, who could undertake the cost and effort to develop a master plan for St. Benedict’s in a nonbinding agreement; it also reflected a willingness to coordinate with the Mirr Ranch Group.
Chase and McFlynn presented the Friends of the Monastery’s concepts to Rogers just weeks before the listing was announced.
“[Father] Vincent said, basically, ‘Thank you very much. We appreciate your interest. We know how much work you’ve put into this thing, but we’re going to go a different direction. We’re going to enlist somebody else to sell this property,’” Chase said.
The Friends of the Monastery didn’t abandon their mission, though. They formalized it, establishing the 501(c)3 that makes them eligible for tax-deductible donations.
Even before they were an official nonprofit, the formation of the Friends of the Monastery prompted speculation that they could try to purchase the monastery themselves. But many of its members insist that $150 million is a lofty and unlikely goal, even for such a well-connected group.
McFlynn said that fundraising could be more focused on “expanding the Friends, making the Friends’ voice multiplied, [making it] more and more helpful to the county and to our objective of conserving the land.” That goal reflects a belief — among the Friends of the Monastery and other community members — that public pressure could help advocate for a conservation solution and prevent a more development-intensive outcome.
In large part, the Friends of the Monastery see themselves as advocates and eager partners, working with other organizations and individuals. They believe a number of leaders in contemplation and spirituality could be viable collaborators. Pitkin County and the Aspen Valley Land Trust have already expressed their willingness to team up with others, too.
“I would love to have such a partnership right now to go after this,” Will said. He wants prospective buyers to know “the door is open” for collaboration — and that there is the opportunity to implement a conservation easement simultaneous with the closing of the property.
He also sees the potential to pool financial resources with other municipalities and government agencies, as the county has pursued that kind of partnership in the past.
“We’d jump at the chance to do something like that at the monastery, if there were some other folks coming to the table with some wherewithal,” Will said.
Erin Quinn, conservation director of the Aspen Valley Land Trust, believes collaboration is “really the only logical route to success at this point.” She said the nonprofit is an “expert” in partnerships, and they’d be eager to collaborate as well.
“The more people, the more groups, the more philanthropists that can get involved and really piece it all together, the better,” Quinn said. “The catch is: Once you get more and more partners, there’s that many more opinions about what the future of the place should look like.”
Act of “extraordinary administration”
Regardless of local enthusiasm — and regardless of other organizations’ willingness to team up — there is still the matter of the church hierarchy, which has oversight and veto power on a transaction of this magnitude.
Acts of “extraordinary administration,” such as the sale or devaluation of high-dollar property, require approval from the Vatican, according to the Cistercian constitution and canon law. The monastery listing far exceeds the $7.5 million threshold for a sale in any diocese with a population greater than 500,000. (St. Benedict’s, as part of the Archdiocese of Denver, falls into that category.)
That review process goes through the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, a department of the Holy See.
Rogers wrote in an email that the request for approval will be submitted “when a firm offer is made for the property.” The abbot general will seek permission from the dicastery after he is informed of the details.
According to Romilda Ferrauto, a representative from the Vatican’s press office, the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life will not comment on specific cases and defers questions on such matters to local authorities. However, there are guidelines from the dicastery — subject to adaptation for individual cases — that can offer some insight on the factors that may be considered.
In the sale of a property, the guidelines encourage “the collection of multiple offers” and remind sellers to think about “tax implications” as well as market value. A buyer’s “reputation” should be considered, too — and “when the characteristics of the bidder … do not appear coherent with the values of the respective institutes, the proposal should be rejected.”
The guidelines also state that priority should be given to “other ecclesial bodies” — that is, other communities within the Christian faith — and sellers should avoid a transaction “that would put in jeopardy the common good of the church.”
Meanwhile, the Archdiocese of Denver has “been following canonical processes related to the sale and await the Cistercians to do the same” in a process that can be lengthy and complex, according to a statement sent by Kevin Greaney, executive director of marketing and communications.
“It is, of course, our hope that the Snowmass property maintains its historical identity as a Catholic property, per what we presume was the intent of the donors who helped fund its initial development as a monastery,” the statement reads.
However, the archdiocese has not commented on whether they would consider making an offer or partnering with other agencies to ensure that the monastery remains a Catholic facility.
The archdiocese also has not commented on whether the Trappist order consulted with the local bishop when they were considering closure of St. Benedict’s — a step in the “process of suppression” that is detailed in an OCSO statute.
Kelly Clark, the archdiocese’s director of communications, declined to answer several follow-up questions about the canonical processes of the sale, citing “the delicate nature of this transaction.”
Money for “needs of the locality”
The resulting financial assets from the sale of the monastery could go to several different purposes.
In large part, the money will follow the surviving members of St. Benedict’s to their next monastery, “respecting the civil law of the place and the will of the founders and donors,” according to the statute on the suppression of a monastery.
But if the assets are deemed “significant,” a portion will be “reserved to help other monasteries of the order, and to respond to the needs of the locality where the monastery is located.” The distribution is “confided to the Commission of Closure.”
There is not a fixed threshold to determine “significant” assets, nor is there a clear definition of the “locality.”
“All this varies for each closure that takes place,” Rogers wrote. “The Order decides these on a case by case basis, since our monasteries exist in widely different geographical areas and economic conditions.”
The guidelines of the Holy See do not preclude a conservation solution — although even if the monastery were to retain ownership, and only convey a conservation easement, the “ceding of land rights” would still be subject to Vatican approval above certain dollar amounts and terms of commitment.
A conservation-minded buyer at St. Benedict’s may even be in alignment with monastic laws and policies. Under a provision for the “adaptation to local culture,” the Cistercian constitution emphasizes the importance of caring for a monastery’s home and for the broader community’s values.
“Wherever new monasteries are established, the founders are to become lovers of that place,” it states. “Monastic life is not to be bound to any particular form of culture, nor to any political, economic or social system, but, as far as possible, what is rightly valued in the local culture should be welcomed as a new means of expressing and enriching the treasure of the Cistercian patrimony.”
Based on county zoning, the monastery could be subdivided into more than 100 30-acre lots — that’s the minimum parcel size. But doing so would require a landowner to go through a lengthy subdivision review process with the county, according to Pitkin County Community Development Director Suzanne Wolff. A Colorado law allows owners to bypass that process if they split lots into 35 acres or more, but they still have to go through other extensive county reviews to build anything on the new sites because they lack development rights.
The county’s competitive Growth Management Quota System allots enough new development rights for only a handful of small buildings or a couple of sizable ones in all of rural Pitkin County each year. Even with less subdivision, it could take decades to secure all the rights for a sprawling residential enclave. And the alternative — purchasing transferable development rights from another property — would be subject to added costs and limited availability. It also requires county review.
For landowners who want to implement conservation easements while retaining some development rights, the county’s Open Space Preservation Master Plan option can help people navigate the land-use code with resources from the Community Development and Open Space and Trails departments.
The county also offers incentives for parcels of 500 acres or more. Owners can skip the quota process for a single-family home, so long as they agree to a conservation easement on most of the property. But they’re still subject to special review from the Pitkin Board of County Commissioners and caps on maximum floor area.
Moreover, the Snowmass Capitol Creek Caucus has taken a firm stance in favor of preserving the monastery land in perpetuity, and they have the charter to make such recommendations to the Board of County Commissioners.
In light of all this, a monastery suburb of 30-acre lots isn’t just “very unlikely,” Mirr said. “‘It won’t happen’ is kind of what I tell people.”
