Remains of Texas monks reburied in new abbey crypt
The Rev. Damian Szodenyi rose slowly from the grave, his earthly remains hoisted by the bucket of a backhoe, the chug and thunk of the big machine interrupting his long rest.
Buried since 1998, his remains were soon carried to a maintenance area, away from public view. There, his concrete funeral container would be opened, the simple wooden box inside it removed and Szodenyi’s bones transferred to a new casket in preparation for one last journey.
In life, he had been a Hungarian immigrant, a teacher, a headmaster, a University of Dallas dean and an artist. But above all, he had been a Cistercian monk.
Unlike some other Catholic monks, such as Jesuits and Dominicans, Cistercians take a vow of stability that commits them to their brothers, and to one place, for life — and beyond. This unusual promise binds the men together as they seek God in their lives.
But for years, Cistercian Abbey Our Lady of Dallas had no cemetery or mausoleum on its Irving campus, so the monks who lived and died there were buried several miles away at Calvary Hill Cemetery.
That was unsettling to the survivors, who wanted their brothers with them.
Now they will be. In June, after years of praying and planning, the abbey dedicated a new, $1.5 million crypt, built largely with donations from alumni of the all-male Cistercian Preparatory School. The monks are bringing their brothers back to the abbey, all 20 of them, in reverse order of death. Eleven have already been moved and entombed in the crypt.
“Not even death separates us from the community to which we took vows as young men,” said the Rev. Peter Verhalen, the Cistercian abbot.
A box of teeth
On a hot day in late June, two more monks would begin their two-day pilgrimage — Szodenyi and the Rev. Rudolph Zimanyi, who died in 1994. It would fall to funeral director Chris Taylor to gently and respectfully transfer their remains — and whatever they might have taken with them to the grave.
Taylor, of Dignity Memorial, got interested in undertaking when the nuns at his Catholic school sent him to serve funerals as an altar boy. In the business 40 years, he buried many of the monks he’s now disinterring.
“I dearly love their community,” he said.
To prepare for his work, he pulled on a blue protective suit, blue rubber gloves and a straw hat. After breaking down the concrete container, he assessed Szodenyi’s wooden casket, which had darkened and deteriorated over the years. Reaching in, he came upon the crucifix that had been buried with the priest. It was worn and caked in mud, but salvageable.
Three monks dressed in black and white habits watched over the funeral director as he worked. Verhalen, the abbot, was a boy when he first met Szodenyi. He remembered the old monk as “a Renaissance guy” who would ask boys applying to Cistercian Prep if they knew who Homer was.
Verhalen’s answer at age 9: “I have no idea!”
Taylor reached into Szodenyi’s casket and withdrew an object.
A pink, plastic box, about the size of a fist.
“His teeth,” Taylor said. “We would have put them in there with him. Because you don’t want to get to heaven and not have your teeth.”
The monks smiled their beatific smiles.
“It’s funny,” said the Rev. Paul McCormick, who was a novice — an apprentice monk — during Szodenyi’s retirement years. “He used to always lose his teeth.”
Slowly and carefully, to avoid disturbing the remains, Taylor and his assistant, Alan Stewart, exposed the thin white mattress on which Szodenyi’s body had been laid out. The operation had a distinct military feel because Stewart, who is former Air Force, kept calling Taylor “sir.”
On the mattress, one could see a few bones, Szodenyi’s shoes and socks, and the stained but unmistakable black and white habit in which he was buried.
His brother monks, dressed identically, gazed upon him in silence.
Removing the second monk, Zimanyi, was harder. His concrete container crumbled when the backhoe touched it, so the cemetery workers had to attach the cables to the casket itself. Fortunately, Zimanyi had been buried in a metal box, so though it was rusted, it held together when the backhoe hoisted it out.
Back behind the maintenance shed, Taylor and Stewart cleared the mud away from the casket. After 30 minutes of hot, hard work, they lowered Zimanyi into a new, 20-gauge steel casket.
The second burials
The trip from Calvary Hill to Cistercian is 3 miles as the soul flies, 4.8 miles by city streets. The monks made the journey the next day in separate black Cadillac Echelon hearses, or “coaches,” as the funeral industry euphemistically calls them.
A dozen of their brothers awaited them at the abbey. Cistercian has 26 monks, but a few were traveling and several are too old to be pallbearers. When the hearses arrived, young monks loaded the caskets onto wheeled carts and steered them down a ramp into the crypt.
The space is unadorned, befitting the simplicity of the monks’ lives. The walls and floor are concrete, with six concrete pillars supporting the roof. On the far wall hangs a crucifix illuminated by a narrow skylight.
The crypt is God’s filing cabinet, and each monk who has died has a reserved space with his name on it.
The young monks milled around in their black and white habits, waiting for the service to start. Some of them never met the older guys, but they know how the communists drove their brother monks out of Hungary, and how the displaced monks landed in Texas in the mid-1950s.
“For us, this service represents the continuity of generations,” the Rev. Thomas Esposito said. “It’s the ultimate sign that their enterprise succeeded. A definitive statement that we’re here to stay.”
Verhalen called the service to order. Priests don’t often have occasion to preside over someone’s second burial, and the liturgy offered no hints on how to do it. Verhalen consulted with Austrian monks esteemed for their knowledge of such things.
Their advice: Go with the standard graveside service.
“Our brothers Damian and Rudolph have gone to their rest in the peace of Christ,” Verhalen began, as 14 monks and three funeral home employees listened with their hands folded in front of them.
“May we who mourn be reunited one day with our broth-