Tower Topics ~ Summer 2001

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Fr. Augustine Stock passes to new life

Very early in the morning of May 11, 2001, while his monastic community was rising to celebrate Easter vigils in honor of the holy Abbots of Cluny, Father Augustine Stock, OSB, passed over from death to a new life in the monastery’s Saint Stephen Infirmary. He died quietly and rather unexpectedly in the eighty-second year of his life. He had been living in the infirmary for the last six years in declining health.

Born of Anthony and Winifred Delaney Stock in St. Joseph, Mo., on Jan. 26, 1920, he was baptized in the Church of St. Francis Xavier on Feb. 8, 1920, receiving the name of Raymond Daniel. He grew up in St Joseph, graduating from St. Francis Xavier Grade School and, in 1938, from Christian Brothers High School. He began his college studies at Conception in 1939, but in 1941 continued them at St. Michael’s College University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in 1944.

In July of that same year he entered the novitiate and made his first profession of vows on July 11, 1945, when he received the name of Augustine. After completing the regular course in theological studies he was ordained to the priesthood on August 28, 1948.

After teaching at Conception during the school year of 1949-50, Father Augustine was sent to Rome for advanced study in theology and Scripture from 1950-52. These studies served to form him into one of Conception’s outstanding scholars. Further studies and writings in Scripture are the outstanding features of the rest of his life.

From 1952 to 1963 he taught courses in Scripture, primarily New Testament, in our Seminary College. In 1963 Abbot Anselm Coppersmith appointed him to be the prior of St. Knud’s Priory in Denmark, a small foundation of Conception Abbey which subsequently was closed. He held this position until 1965. At this time he returned to the monastery to continue his teaching in the seminary and to serve in other capacities which were designed to give him opportunity to continue his biblical studies. He continued teaching until 1981. He was chaplain to the Franciscan Sisters at Mount Alverno Convent and St. Francis Hospital in Maryville from 1981 to 1984.

Around 1985 Father Augustine’s eyesight began to be troublesome and a progressive worsening of the problem began to limit his activities considerably until, in 1995, he retired to Saint Stephen’s Infirmary where he continued his biblical studies and writing, publishing his last book, The Method and the Message of Matthew, in 1994. After that his voracious habit of reading had to be exchanged for listening to books on tape.

It will be his accomplishments in biblical studies for which Father Augustine will be remembered by the wider community. Already before becoming a monk, he had collaborated with Father Newton Thompson, a noted editor of the B. Herder Book Co., in the arduous task of producing what was to become known as The Thompson-Stock Concordance to the Bible. That was only the beginning of a series of about a dozen books, from The Lamb of God in 1945 to The Method and the Message of Matthew. In addition to these books he also published numerous articles in a wide variety of scholarly biblical periodicals over the years. He was a long-time member of the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature.

At home, in the monastery, Father Augustine will also be remembered for other qualities as well. As meticulous in his hobbies as in his scholarly work, he became especially “famous” in the monastic sense of the term as an amateur photographer who spent many hours in the dark room developing his own photos and those of his confreres. Many of the landscape pictures of the Abbey property and of the monks that are often still used in Abbey publications are from his hand. The most famous of these are those aerial photos which he took, bravely riding in the hot-air balloon brought onto campus by one of the seminarians.

We at Conception will long remember the many contributions he made to our community’s life and we, along with his family, ask that you remember him in prayer.

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