Br. Gordon Barnard, OSB
October 7, 1932 - November 16, 2002

Brother Gordon Barnard, OSB, died on November 16, 2002, in the ichardton Health Center from complications due to his rheumatoid arthritic condition. He had been strengthened with the sacraments of the dying.

Gordon Barnard was born October 7, 1932, in Mandan, ND and received his elementary education there. He attended St. John's High School in Collegeville, MN, for one year but transfered to Assumption Abbey High School in Richardton from which he graduated in 1950. Gordon was athletically gifted in many sports; while a student in the Abbey School, he was captain of the football, basketball, and track teams.

Gordon entered Assumption Abbey in 1951 and professed vows as a Benedictine monk on July 11, 1952. Bro. Gordon worked in the Abbey all his years, principally in the Abbey's print shop--an area in which he became a master printer and teacher of the art of printing to many others. He was a careful and meticulous craftsman and no printing job came out of the Abbey Press short of perfection.

Brother Gordon was also the Abbey's keeper of bees; he learned this trade from his family in Mandan before joining the Abbey. For nearly 50 years he saw to it that the tables of the monastic dining room were laden with good, sweet honey.

However, Brother Gordon's most enduring and endearing "work" and witness as a monkwas not as a printer or a beekeeper, but as one who gave a lived, Christ-like example of how to bear with much pain and suffering. At an early age he was stricken with arthritis and in 1953 he was diagnosed with degenerative rheumatoid arthritis. The disease proved to be very degenerative and so it gradually spread to virtually every joint of his body. Consequently he lived with the debilitating effects and pain of the diseasenearly 50 years. Nonetheless, most of that ime he continued to work full time in the print shop while dutifully fulfilling all of the monastic obligations of prayer and other activities. In addition, in recent years, he developed aministry of reaching out to other with similar problems of incurable painful illness, counseling them and suggesting remedies to help ease the pain.

He is survived by his monastic brothers in the Abbey, and by his brothers Raphael, Mandan; Leo, Jacksonville, TX; and his sister Dolores Vyzralek, Bismarck.