Retired Archabbot of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Douglas R. Nowicki, O.S.B., (79), died Tuesday, July 23, in Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, following a brief illness. The eleventh Archabbot of Saint Vincent, he served from 1991 until he reached the retirement age of 75 in May of 2020, when he retired. He was the second longest-serving Archabbot in the 178-year history of Saint Vincent. With more than 150 monks, St. Vincent was the first Benedictine monastery in the United States, and is one of the largest monasteries in the world. He will be buried on July 29, 2024.

When he was elected in 1991 I was still a member of the monastic Community in Latrobe. My mentor—the late Géza Grosschmid, Ph.D.—and I were given the job of devising a coat of arms for the new Archabbot. Ultimately, Archabbot Douglas rejected the design Dr. Grosschmid suggested and went with a modified version of it devised by me. Essentially, it illustrated the motto, taken from St. John Henry Newman, “Cor Ad Cor Loquitur” which means “Heart Speaks To Heart”.

Above we see my original drawing of the coat of arms without the motto added. The dexter impalement depicts the coat of arms adopted by St. Vincent Archabbey in the early 20th Century under the abbatial term of the Rt. Rev. Alfred Koch, OSB, the 5th Archabbot of St. Vincent. It depicts the blue and silver elongated diamond-shaped fusils taken from the arms of the Royal House of Wittelsbach, the Kings of Bavaria. This alluded to the origin of the founding monk and first Archabbot of St. Vincent, Boniface Wimmer, OSB who was from St. Michael’s Abbey in Bavaria, as well as to the patronage and financial assistance given to the fledgling community through the Ludwigs-Missionverein, an organization established by King Ludwig I of Bavaria to support missionary efforts in the new world.

The black horizontal fess with three plates (white roundels) seen on the arms of William Penn is reshaped as an inverted chevron to form the letter “V” for Vincent and the three plates are charged with three crosses. The arms of the Archabbey are impaled—joined on the same shield—with the Archabbot’s personal arms. This marshaling of two separate coats of arms on the same shield employs the same method used for the coat of arms of two armigerous people who are married. It indicates the “marriage” of the armiger with the place of his jurisdiction with the arms of the jurisdiction occupying the place of the groom and the personal arms occupying the place of the bride.

The Archabbot’s personal arms, as I said, illustrate the motto.

I had also presented Archabbot Douglas with the option of displaying his arms ensigned by a galero with twenty tassels rather than merely twelve. In a manner similar to that of an archbishop using twenty tassels to a bishop’s twelve tassels, I proposed that as an Archabbot he also make use of this distinctive galero indicating his rank. Archabbots don’t actually have any greater jurisdiction or privileges over other Abbots (the one exception being that he may occupy a senior place in the procession whenever attending a gathering of several Abbots). In addition, none of the other previous ten Archabbots of St. Vincent made use of such a galero so, ultimately, he decided to honor that precedent and rejected the idea.

Although his two immediate predecessors had armorial achievements that did not display the usual veiled abbatial crozier Archabbot Douglas agreed with my suggestion he do so. When St. Paul VI reformed many things concerning the dress and externals of the hierarchy in 1969 one of his decisions included removing the mitre and crozier from the coats of arms of Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops. They were seen as superfluous since episcopal coats of arms make use of the episcopal cross as the sign of the armiger holding the rank of (arch)bishop. However, it was not the intention to remove the use of the veiled crozier—a peculiarly abbatial heraldic symbol—from the coats of arms of Abbots. The veil became a symbol of abbatial croziers in a time before Abbots would have worn pontifical gloves when pontificating. The veil served the useful function of protecting the shaft of the crozier from dirt and oils from the hand. Later, even after pontifical gloves were used by Abbots, the veil, or sudarium, remained attached to the crozier to distinguish such a heraldic emblem from that of a bishop. Despite the reforms of St. Paul VI which referred to the coats of arms specifically of Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops, the veiled crozier remains to this day as the heraldic emblem of Abbots and Abbesses.

As I said, Archabbot Douglas was happy to follow my advice in this regard. I noted on one of my subsequent visits to the Archabbey that the display of archabbatial coats of arms in the Archabbot’s outer office included a new rendering of Archabbot Douglas’ coat of arms with the veiled crozier omitted. It could be that there was simply an effort to have his coat of arms artistically conform to the pattern followed by his two immediate predecessors. One also is moved to wonder, however, if the person responsible was simply acting in ignorance? It would be hoped that the move was not a deliberate one. If it were, it would constitute an action displaying the most blatant ignorance of commonly accepted heraldic practices in the Church as laid out in the excellent and scholarly work of the late Bruno B. Heim, Heraldry in the Catholic Church, as well as in several other similar publications. In other words, don’t take my word for it! It’s verifiable independently of my opinion. In fact, my collaborator on this project for Archabbot Douglas, Dr. Grosschmid, was a close friend and collaborator of Archbishop Heim who was widely accepted as the foremost expert in Catholic ecclesiastical heraldry of his day. Dr. Grosschmid concurred with my assertion that the Archabbot’s coat of arms should employ the veiled crozier which is why I felt so comfortable advising the Archabbot in that way.

Nevertheless, in this later rendering it was omitted. I note, too, that Archabbot Douglas’ successor, Archabbot Martin de Porres Bartel, OSB, the twelfth Archabbot, similarly omits the veiled crozier from his armorial achievement, no doubt advised in the same manner that was (accidentally or deliberately) ignorant of the appropriate practices. I note, too, with some satisfaction that the Wikipedia article about Archabbot Douglas correctly displays his coat of arms according to the manner in which I designed it. (below)

May he Rest in Peace.