The Devil Went Down to Snowmass

With the sale of St. Benedict's Monastery to Alex Karp, the darkness encroaches another 3,700 acres.

St. Benedict’s Abbey in Snowmass, Colorado. Image provenance unknown.

Sad news comes down the line that St. Benedict’s, the Trappist abbey in Snowmass, Colorado, was recently sold for $120 Million to one of the most odious billionaires infecting the world today: Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies. Karp’s secretive company is at the heart of the “surveillance-industrial state” being built and deployed in the United States and abroad. It is Karp and Palantir that are assisting the Trump Administration in creating a “mega-database” that will merge the private data of all Americans - ranging from tax returns and medical records to voting histories, legal records, internet usage, sales tax records, and more - into a giant array that can then be analyzed by artificial intelligence. In a world where data is king, the joint Trump/Karp project is aimed at a kind of digital panopticon, which would give those who control it enormous power over the lives of every living person in this country. Even George Orwell would recoil at the potential for totalitarian control inherent in this project, which is happening right now!

Named for the “seeing stones” used by the evil Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels, Palantir itself was a creation of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the US Intelligence Community (IC). With massive In-Q-Tel backing, Karp co-founded the company in 2003 along with fellow weirdo and billionaire Peter Thiel. Originally, Palantir’s remit was to build battlefield and intelligence applications for more efficient target selection, pattern recognition, and so on. Palantir still provides that capability to the IC, the US military, and foreign governments, most notably the Israeli Defense Forces, with which it has a “strategic partnership.”

But with the end of America’s hot wars in the Middle East, Palantir’s application portfolio has expanded relentlessly and now includes a wide range of domestic, non-military data integration and analysis platforms, including, ominously, what the ACLU has called “predictive policing.” As fans of the movie Minority Report will recognize, this is nothing less than “precrime” but without the “precogs” bathing in photon milk. A taste of Palantir’s “predictive policing” is evident in the company’s work for the Department of Homeland Security, where Palantir’s AI tools are the engine behind the pursuit, capture, and deportation of undocumented immigrants and the occasional American citizen. On top of all this evil - including the slaughter in Gaza, Trump’s incipient digital panopticon, and the ruthless uprooting of peaceful, hardworking immigrants - is Alex Karp. And now he’ll conduct his symphony of greed and power from the 3,700-acre St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, CO.

Alex Karp on the left. Fr. Thomas Keating on the right. Image via ChatGPT.

The Trappist monastery at Snowmass, Colorado, was founded in 1956 by a group of pioneer Trappist monks from St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. Two years later, Rev. Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O. was named superior of the small community and moved to Snowmass, joined by an additional cohort of brothers from St. Joseph’s. Fr. Keating was the prior at Snowmass until he returned to Massachusetts as the abbot of St. Joseph’s. Finally, in 1984, Keating stepped down as the abbot at St. Joseph’s and moved back to Snowmass, where he lived for much of the rest of his life. And though he died at the mother abbey in Massachusetts, he was buried at Snowmass, in accordance with his wishes.

Like Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky and Thomas Merton, Snowmass is known for the life and work of Thomas Keating, especially his development of Centering Prayer and his founding of Contemplative Outreach, “a spiritual network of individuals and small faith communities committed to living the contemplative dimension of the Gospel.” Through Fr. Keating’s work, including over forty books on the subject, the practice of contemplative prayer was rescued from it’s post-Tridentine exile to again become commonplace for many Christians of all denominations, including this writer. In Catholicism, this recovery of an authentic contemplative tradition has been one of the major fruits of the Second Vatican Council. It so happens that Thomas Keating was one of the instruments the Holy Spirit chose to awaken and extend this dimension of the Church’s spiritual patrimony.

And now that place Fr. Keating called home, where he prayed so intently with his brothers for so many years, where he meditated upon God in the beauty of their mountain valley, where he wrote books that have inspired generations, where he welcomed seekers from around the world to learn more about the contemplative dimension of the Gospel, where his mortal remains are buried; that place will be a playground for Alex Karp, a man committed to violence, division, expulsion, money, power, and social control. The devil went down to Snowmass, but at this time of year we have to remember that the devil will not win. In fact, he’s already lost, decisively defeated by the child born this week in Bethlehem.