“Bless this house, which has given so much to so many.” — Program Book from St. Benedict’s Monastery’s last Mass, Jan. 11, 2026
Before first light hit the eastern flank of Mount Sopris — before the sun could warm the mesas and forests that slope toward Capitol Creek, or bake the sprawling ranches and fields on the valley floor — the Trappist brothers of St. Benedict’s Monastery would rise from their beds, and they would pray.
They listened to scripture. They meditated. They read, they studied, and they prayed. By the time they opened the chapel doors to the public for morning Mass, the Catholic monks of St. Benedict’s had been praying longer than most anyone else had been awake.
And when the angle of the sun was just right — around, say, the second week of January — it could set the stained-glass window that towers above the chapel’s altar aglow just in time for the start of services, 7:30 a.m. most days and 8:15 a.m. on Sundays. As monastery patrons settled into their seats and the monks began the Mass, this vision of a virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus could appear almost lit from within. Spend enough time at St. Benedict’s in Old Snowmass, and you might feel just the same way.
“You just want to be out there all the time. You just want to absorb it all,” said Jill Sabella, who first encountered St. Benedict’s as a college student in the 1960s and reached “a whole different kind of intimate level” when she moved to Old Snowmass in the early 2000s. (She would later help the monks with housekeeping, and with a commemorative book for the monastery’s 60th anniversary.)
“Everybody says the air changes when you leave Capitol Creek Road,” and turn onto the dirt drive that wends past grazing cattle and views of the Elk Mountains to the retreat center, chapel and cloisters, Sabella said. “The beauty of it is just overwhelming.”
To her, the significance of this place was not about going to a church, as in an institution. Instead, “it’s the awakening and nurturing and acceptance up there, the contemplation and the solitude,” she said. It was also, inextricably, about the monks, each with their own sense of humor and intellect and grace and humanity, whose life of prayer would continue into a day of work and worship before they entered a “great silence” at night.
“I think a lot of people like myself are drawn to it, because there’s something in us that has wanted to live that life too,” Sabella said.
Now, they will have to look elsewhere. Seventy years after the monastery was founded in Old Snowmass, by a group of monks dispatched from an abbey in Massachusetts, St. Benedict’s held its final Mass on Jan. 11 for a crowd of several hundred people. Following a yearslong process of closure, including multiple offers and numerous ideas about the future of this property of more than 3,700 acres, it sold on Dec. 15 for $120 million to Espen LLC.
One day after the sale closed, the Wall Street Journal identified the buyer as Alex Karp, the billionaire CEO of a data analysis software company called Palantir, known for its contracts with military and intelligence agencies and major businesses. The Journal reported that, according to one of the listing agents, the monastery’s new owner intends to use the property for a home.
Two weeks later, in a story headlined “The Year of the $100 Million House,” it was noted that “Karp in a statement to the Journal said he plans to work with the previous users of the property to continue to care for the land.” Aspen Journalism has not received a response to several requests for an interview with Karp.
Filling the spiritual void
Abbot Vincent Rogers, who oversees the monastery’s “mother house” of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, confirmed after the final Sunday Mass that Karp’s offer was approved by the Holy See’s Dicastery for Institutes of Apostolic Life and the Societies of Consecrated Life, as required by Canon Law for a transaction of this magnitude.
The sale and closure had been initiated by higher-ups in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, which is commonly known as the Trappist order, as those decision-makers considered factors like the number of monks, their age profile, and whether the buildings are suitable for the current community, as outlined in the order’s statute on fragile communities and the “suppression,” or closure, of a monastery.
Though numbers had fluctuated throughout St. Benedict’s history, the monastery had experienced a steep drop-off in recent years, from 18 members in 2009 to 10 in 2022, according to data from the Cistercian Order. And as some of the younger monks moved on from St. Benedict’s, the average age of its population skewed much older.
In the summer 2022, at Rogers’ request, the order’s abbot general suspended the autonomy of St. Benedict’s; that fall, a General Chapter of abbots and abbesses from Trappist monasteries and nunneries around the world voted to close the monastery during their triennial meeting. Monks shuttered the bookstore and retreat center in the spring of 2023, the first public indication that the entire monastery would close eventually. The property hit the market with a list price of $150 million in the spring of 2024.
“Over two-and-a-half years of just going, ‘we’re going to lose this place,’ … it cut to the soul,” said Mary Lou Farrell, who has been coming to the monastery since Christmas midnight Mass in the 1970s. She and her husband Joe have gone up to St. Benedict’s for decades, including for retreats, and started attending regularly after their children grew up. The closure of St. Benedict’s “leaves a void in our spiritual life,” Joe Farrell said.
“We’ll fill it up with something,” he added — perhaps, in the near term, with time in nature. But for now, said Mary Lou Farrell, “I just want to keep soaking [it] in, letting all of what we’ve had these past several years clothe us.”
“We don’t have to like it, but we have to accept it,” Joe Farrell said.
The same might be said for the monks, some of whom have lived in Old Snowmass for decades.
Four of the five monks who remained at St. Benedict’s left for different houses in the Trappist order this past week: three to the mother house of St. Joseph’s Abbey, and one to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a monastery in the forest of Carlton, Oregon, southwest of Portland.
One, the longtime ranch manager, is remaining onsite to help the new owner with the intricacies of a property that has been revered in part because of the monks’ gentle stewardship. To these religious brothers, care of all creation meant coexistence with it. Prayer, from the beginning, was an essential characteristic of their toil.
“It is essential to recognize the influence the monks have had on the community, both spiritually and through their exemplary stewardship of the land,” the monastery’s co-listing agent Ken Mirr said in a post on Mirr Ranch Group’s social media last month.
“The new owner is committed to the current and future care of the property, including maintaining the property’s character as a local cattle ranch while preserving habitat for wildlife,” according to the statement from Mirr, who listed the property with his daughter, broker associate Haley Mirr, and with Michael Latousek of Douglas Elliman Aspen. “While many tears will be shed by the closing of St. Benedict’s, the proceeds will have a considerable impact on lives throughout the world.”
‘God will provide’
“One can’t separate the experience of St. Benedict’s without being mindful of its location,” said Tim Costello, whose uncle, the late Father Joseph Boyle, was the monastery’s beloved abbot for more than 30 years. “One couldn’t come to the steps of the monastery without being awed by the beauty of its setting and by views of majestic Mount Sopris. I think that might put you in a [certain headspace] before you even got in the door.”
It was the people, though, who made this place something more than its breathtaking physical landscape, according to many who have spent years coming to the monastery.
Costello saw that essence in the Liturgy of the Eucharist — when the congregation, instead of watching a priest consecrate the bread and wine from afar, would often leave their seats and gather together in the center of the chapel for the process that leads to the reception of Holy Communion.
“That was very different from anything you might experience in parish life. … It was reminiscent of the Last Supper,” Costello said.
The sheer volume of people precluded that usual gathering for the final Mass, though, as hundreds arrived in lines of cars to bid farewell to this place and its monks. The chapel has filled in with extra seats before — warranted especially at Christmas and Easter, as well as the second-to-last Sunday Mass on Jan. 4.
But this time, even “standing room only” would not fit everyone in the room. They spilled out into the corridor, where arched windows cast a soft light on the brick walls, and as that filled up too, they crowded into the meditation room with a bird’s eye view next door, pressing their faces to the glass to watch the proceedings below. The air was like that memorial, perhaps a celebration of life: To say goodbye to the monastery, said St. Benedict’s regular Craig Ward, was “like losing a real close friend.”
“The monastery reminds people of a piece of themselves,” Boyle, the late abbot, once told journalist Colleen Smith when she visited St. Benedict’s on a magazine assignment decades ago.
“Archetypically, in every person is the monk’s need to listen in silence to the deeper but unseen dimensions of life, to be open to dialogue with God and refreshed by a relatively simple lifestyle,” Boyle said the time, as Smith recounted in a recent column for The Denver Gazette. “On the one hand, life is life — inside or outside the monastery. … On the other hand, we organize our lives so that as much of our energy as possible is focused on the spiritual life and the search for God.
“There’s a need in the fullness of the human race for people who dedicate themselves and empty out their schedule to stare at the mystery and even celebrate it in song.”
So, when Father Charles Albanese shared gratitude for “the silence and wonder of the sacred valley,” and preached of acceptance, forbearance and perseverance during his homily on Jan. 11, the people knew what he meant. “The vocation to be light, and to confront the darkness” was a message that felt enduring, with or without the monastery.
“The one thing that we do have to do … is what Father Charlie said at the last Mass,” said Becky Ward, Craig’s wife, who has more than four decades of history with the monastery. (They consider the monks their friends; one came to their wedding decades ago, left for evening prayers, then returned to continue celebrating.)
“We just have to be thankful for this place and to have had this place for so many years,” Becky Ward said. “And I think, if we can keep that in the forefront, about how special this place was and how lucky we were to experience it, something else will come. … God will provide.”
An interspiritual legacy
“The thing that attracted me from the very beginning is, even though the monastery was a Catholic monastery, they welcomed everyone,” Becky Ward said. “They didn’t care if you were Catholic or another Christian faith, or Buddhist, or a Jewish faith. They welcomed everyone. And they were kind and loving to everyone.”
The monks’ homilies at Mass might refer to other religions, and the leaders of different faiths. They’ve been known to weave in literature and scientific themes, too, as well as matters of daily life and an admiration of the natural world.
“There’s a higher being for all of us” was the point, Becky Ward said. “And … the important thing is how we treat each other, and take care of each other.”
This was no accident. In the 1960s, a series of meetings by the Second Vatican Council led to significant changes in the Catholic Church and prompted religious institutions to reevaluate their structure, philosophy and practices. These shifts, commonly known as Vatican II, opened the door to interreligious dialogue and encouraged institutions to engage with contemporary issues.
Father Thomas Keating, a giant in the world of contemplative spirituality and a leader at both St. Benedict’s and its mother house of St. Joseph’s, embraced the call, and in 1984 spearheaded a series of conferences in Snowmass that welcomed the leaders of different faiths. The conversations would continue for the next three decades, and have since spawned other talks with the same ethos.
“We were beginning to really explore, not so much the differences between traditions in an interreligious sense — ‘I practice this, I believe this, this is what I do” — but our actual deepest experiences of transformation, of the spiritual journey, of the depths of reality itself,” said Rory McEntee, who became a mentee of Keating and ultimately served as an administrator for the final years of the dialogues. “In that sharing, we become changed.”
McEntee is now the executive director and president of the Charis Foundation for New Monasticism and Interspirituality based in New Mexico, which he cofounded in 2015 with Netanel Miles-Yépez and Adam Bucko after a retreat at St. Benedict’s with Keating. (McEntee was a close student of another leader in interspirituality, the late Brother Wayne Teasdale, through whom he connected with Keating years earlier.)
“Thomas would often say it’s not enough to just tolerate other religious traditions, other spiritual paths,” McEntee said. “We have to learn to love them with all that we are, and so it goes beyond even respect and tolerance, to a kind of unity.”
The foundation supports initiatives like the Charis Snowmass Dialogues, which seek to continue the work of those earlier conversations in locations around the country, and the Keating-Schachter Center for Interspirituality at Naropa University in Boulder.
The foundation also runs contemplative retreats at the Charis Mandala Sanctuary in New Mexico, and used to hold some retreats at St. Benedict’s. At one point, its leaders developed a fundraising pitch to buy the monastery and operate it as a Charis property, in an effort to maintain its spiritual legacy, build community and bring back retreats to Old Snowmass.
“We thought we could get there, and people who are in the know, and knew a lot of people, thought we could get there,” McEntee said, but the effort lost momentum when another interested buyer went under contract and then backed out in 2025.
St. Benedict’s Monastery was “a center for this work” of interspirituality, McEntee said.
With Keating’s mentorship, it also supported the growth of the New Monastic movement, which draws upon monks’ spiritual callings and contemplative traditions and applies those to a life out “‘in the world,’ amongst intimate relationships, friendships, family and daily hardships,” according to the Charis Foundation website. As Father Adam Bucko described it, New Monasticism is not about “necessarily leaving the world, but rather showing up in it, where all of our actions flow from that place deep within us of contemplative prayer.”
It is a philosophy that still depends on solitude and silence, even as it reaches to the outside world, said Bucko, an Episcopal priest who is now cofounder and director of the Center for Spiritual Imagination at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. He is also a vowed member of the New Monastic Community of the Incarnation.
“All of us need places of refuge where we can go and truly spend an extended period of time, immersing ourselves in silence, going into the desert of our hearts and listening deeply to what is there,” Bucko said.
“For many people, St Benedict’s Monastery was that kind of a refuge,” he added.
Another group, the Friends of the Monastery, had also developed a proposal for the property, which they had hoped could continue spiritual traditions and conserve open space while still maximizing revenue for the monks. After the monastery hit the market, the Friends incorporated as a nonprofit, with the belief that advocacy could help achieve their goal. But their formal meetings stopped around the time the monastery was under contract last spring.
“We’ve run out of things we could do,” said John Bennett, one of the members of the Friends of the Monastery. Though “there were certainly lots of phone calls” among the Friends in recent months, Bennett said the nature of those conversations was something like, “Have you heard anything?”
Bennett was there for the last Mass on Jan. 11. It was “moving,” and “beautiful,” he said, in part “because there were so many memories of the place.”
“We all had this enormous sense of gratitude that this had been in our lives so long,” Bennett said. As for the new owner: “We certainly hope, and I believe, that he will be a good steward of the land.”
Not the place, but ‘what it’s offered us’
There are places where the Cistercian life is growing: more monasteries exist now than 70 years ago, especially in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. And yet the number of monks and nuns in the order has decreased, leaving smaller populations in each community, according to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance website.
When, “due to particular and long-standing circumstances, a monastery no longer offers any basis for hope of growth,” the order’s statues say that “careful consideration is given to whether it should be closed.”
Bucko sees the closure of St. Benedict’s as “part of a larger trend”: Religious properties elsewhere have been sold and turned into residences too; people are “migrating outside of churches,” and they aren’t “going to monasteries in [the] numbers that they used to, in terms of vowed religious life.” To him, this is a “tragedy.”
“As a species, we really need sacred places that can sort of, reassemble us,” Bucko said.
But maybe, this time of flux could be reframed, especially for those who lead religious orders, “not as a decline, but rather as a time when the Holy Spirit is trying to do something new,” Bucko said. “There are many people who practice contemplative prayer. There are many people who are trying to learn from monastic spirituality and live that in the world.”
Consider Keating’s work as a pioneer of “centering prayer,” a practice rooted in Christian tradition and akin to silent meditation, that has become a movement in itself. Or think about his role as a founding member of Contemplative Outreach, an organization that now supports more than 90 active chapters in 39 countries and serves more than 40,000 people.
Or, just look at the reach of the book “Come to the Mountain,” which combined existing writings by the monks of St. Benedict’s with new images and additions in honor of the monastery’s 60th anniversary in 2016. Artist Curt Carpenter, who designed the book, had 5,000 copies ordered a decade ago at the insistence of the abbot. By earlier this month, every single edition had been sold or given away; last year, one copy was added to the Basalt Regional Library.
“Perhaps this should not be a conversation about self preservation of religious orders, but rather about how the gifts of those religious orders could be translated and passed on to a new generation,” Bucko said.
“That probably needs to include some properties,” he added, “because a lot of those places need to continue … [as] places of refuge.”
“You can practice contemplative prayer anywhere. You can practice it in the middle of Manhattan,” Bucko said. “But most of us need places that can remind us what it’s all about. And I think it’s a loss every time a place like that is sold, is discontinued, and there are still [a] few other places left that are very beautiful, that are very sacred.”
There are also ways to find the peace that so many discovered at St. Benedict’s even in the absence of a physical space, said Jennie Curtis, who has served for years as an administrator for Contemplative Outreach of Colorado and who used to run retreats at St. Benedict’s through her work for the organization.
The contemplative life is “an inner silence and solitude,” Curtis said. The external environment “certainly supports that,” especially for those still finding their inner sense, “and to do that in community is incredibly supportive for folks, and helps them drop deep into the silence.”
Still, “it’s not the place, so much, especially for contemplatives, as what the place has offered us over the years,” Curtis said.
What now?
Only five monks were active at St. Benedict’s at the time the sale was announced in mid-December, two of whom had come to Snowmass from Spencer in recent years. Earlier in the closure and sale process, St. Joseph’s Abbot Rogers indicated the monks would have some choice in their next destination, but whether any could remain in Snowmass would depend on permission from both monastic superiors and the buyer of the property.
Father Ed Hoffmann, Father Damian Carr and Brother Amadeus are heading to St. Joseph’s; both Carr and Amadeus came from Spencer to Snowmass, so for them, it will be a return journey. Albanese, the former abbot of St. Benedict’s, is off to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Oregon.
One monk is remaining onsite in Snowmass. Brother Raymond Roberts — longtime ranch manager of St. Benedict’s, who knows just about every inch of the property and has lived there some 45 years — will offer his vast knowledge about the property to its new owner. Carr, who was dispatched to Snowmass as a monastic commissary to oversee the care of the fragile community at St. Benedict’s, said the monks would not be available for an interview as they packed up.
Meanwhile, much of the money from the sale will support other monasteries in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, including those monasteries to which these Snowmass monks are transferring. The process is established in the order’s Statute on the Accompaniment of Fragile Communities and on the Suppression of the Monastery.
“The financial assets of the suppressed monastery, respecting the civil law of the place and the will of the founders and donors, follow the surviving members of the community and go, in proportion, to the monasteries that receive them,” according to the statute.
But, “if these assets are significant,” some of funds are “reserved to help other monasteries of the Order, and to respond to the needs of the locality where the monastery is situated.”
In this case, “it is significant,” Rogers confirmed after the last Mass on Jan. 11. A Commission of Closure, composed of five other nuns and monks from the order, oversees the distribution. Rogers said they’re taking into consideration the various causes that Snowmass monks have supported over the years.
And what of the land itself, which some saw as a community asset under the ownership of the monks?
Monastery Road, roughly a mile and a half long from its start at Capitol Creek Road to the chapel and cloisters, is legally considered a private road. But “the monastery has historically invited and welcomed members of the general public to use Monastery Road to attend religious services and attend retreats, as well as to simply walk along Monastery Road to enjoy the beauty of nature,” according to an affidavit from Roberts, recorded with the Pitkin County Clerk and Recorder’s Office on Dec. 17.
That access has come with the “express permission” of the monastery, and “has been allowed as a matter of accommodation, not as a matter of right.” But there has been no contention between the monastery and its visitors over this access: “I have never encountered any person on Monastery Road … who claimed hostile, open, continuous, exclusive, adverse or notorious use of Monastery Road in support of any kind of prescriptive use,” Roberts wrote. “Instead, people who use Monastery Road typically express gratitude for our welcoming, ‘open gate’ policy.”
As of Friday, the road was still open for people to walk and take in the surroundings. But the new owner of the property may limit that in the future if he wishes to.
Members of the Trappist Order and family members of the monks buried in the St. Benedict’s cemetery will retain some rights to visit the gravesites located just upslope from the chapel and cloisters — though their visitation could be subject to some restrictions, based on an access easement granted by Espen LLC.
Family, in this case, includes “any sibling, parent, spouse, child (or step-child), grandchild, cousin, nephew, or other lineal descendant.” The easement has identified several known relatives of the monks currently buried in the monastery — mainly nephews and nieces.
For now, they can get to the cemetery via Monastery Road, but the new property owner may relocate some or all of the access road in the future, according to the easement.
The new owner also reserves the right to install a gate along the access road that can be opened with a code. They won’t be required to provide the code to any of the easement’s “grantees” (that is, Trappist monks and families of those buried in the cemetery); those who wish to visit the cemetery can provide prior notice by contacting a designated lawyer at Holland and Hart, a law firm that is working with the owner, and may have to provide “reasonable evidence” that they’re entitled to access.
That evidence might, for instance, include a driver’s license proving they’re one of the known relatives identified on the easement. Then, the owner and the visitor will agree upon a “reasonable time” to come to the cemetery, and the owner will allow “ingress and egress” from there.
Members of the Trappist Order are subject to an additional restriction — a limit of five cumulative visits in a calendar year. One monk visiting five times would hit that limit, as would five different monks visiting on separate occasions.
The easement does allow the Trappist Order to bury more monks in the cemetery who previously lived at St. Benedict’s — though that, too, has a limit. No more than 10 additional monks may be buried in the cemetery. The easement is set to automatically terminate on Dec. 31, 2097.
As for Karp’s vision for the property, there is hope, from some in the realm of conservation and land use, that whatever he has in mind will bode well for the preservation of open space.
Though past efforts to place a conservation easement on the land never came to fruition, some saw the place as good as conserved under the stewardship of the monks. And though there has been concern about the property’s vulnerability to development under a new owner, Pitkin County’s land use policies that restrict growth would likely hamstring a buyer looking to flip the land into a profitable development.
As for Karp: “A person with his wealth could certainly keep the property untrammeled,” said Dale Will, acquisition and special projects director for Pitkin County Open Space and Trails.
Karp has a net worth of $15.5 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time assessment on Friday. And his portfolio of properties is wide-reaching: As his biographer Michael Steinberger writes in “The Philosopher in the Valley,” Karp has purchased several in recent years, including one in Boulder near Palantir’s Denver headquarters and one near Washington, D.C., as well as “one near Anchorage and one in Sun Valley (he had grown to love the area).” He also added acreage to his property in New Hampshire.
“But none of the homes were palatial — most were modest,” Steinberger wrote, “and despite his enormous wealth, Karp continued to lead a fairly streamlined existence. … His cousin Mat Johnson said Karp had always had a ‘total lack of material obsession’ and jokingly suggested that his vast riches were wasted on him.”
Will also saw hope in the fact that this sale didn’t come with any guarantees about development approvals. Will believes that’s an indication “that development wasn’t [Karp’s] primary focus — and that whatever he thinks he wants to do with the property will fit within … what he’s learned about what’s allowable under the county code.”
Much work beyond a fresh coat of paint would require at least some level of county review for a permit, said Suzanne Wolff, Pitkin County’s community development director. And strict growth-management policies will inform not only Karp’s ability to build a new home but also how he can use existing buildings — some of which were exempted from certain fees and growth-management restrictions because they were designated as “essential community facilities.”
The county can also encourage conservation through the Open Space Preservation Master Plan process, which helps a landowner work toward approvals through the Community Development office and land preservation goals with Open Space and Trails at the same time.
“In a sense, some of the compensation for the conservation easement comes in the form of streamlined development approvals, … as an incentive to encourage the conservation easement,” Will said. “If you combine that with, ‘Open Space can add some cash as necessary to make it work,’ the combination of the two is more powerful than one by itself.”
And, given that Pitkin County has hoped for a conservation easement on the property for decades to protect the land’s scenic and ecological values, “it would be hard to think of a higher priority for the county” than preserving the monastery’s agricultural acreage and its role as a “wildlife haven,” Will said.
What is also clear is that Karp has a proclivity for properties like this one: secluded, surrounded by nature, and often close to cross-country skiing, based reporting in The New York Times and “The Philosopher in the Valley.” One of Karp’s landholdings, in New Hampshire, is sprawling like the monastery, with views of the White Mountains in place of the Elks, but his sparsely furnished house in the woods there is “spartan,” by his own admission to the Times.
He is also a self-described introvert, who likes to be alone with his thoughts. (In addition to his gusto for Nordic skiing, Karp does Tai Chi, a practice that is focused on flow and mind-body connection.) This property, just a brief flight or few hours’ drive from Palantir’s headquarters in Denver, could offer him just that in short order.
With a transaction like this one, real estate agent Ken Mirr said in The Land Bulletin podcast last month, “we’re really just replacing one steward with another.” Now, onlookers are hoping — and praying — this land might hold on to some of its heritage in its next chapter.
“It is a very sacred place and a very sacred land,” said McEntee, from the Charis Foundation. “And I think it’s possible it can have a transforming effect on whoever is on the land, if they’re open to it.”