Abbot: Fr. Peter Verhalen was born in Midland, Texas in 1955, and he graduated from Cistercian Preparatory School in 1973. Two years later he entered Our Lady of Dallas in August, 1975. He made his solemn profession April 6, 1980, and he was ordained to the priesthood April 20, 1981. Fr. Peter has taught English, Religion, and Latin at the school, where he also served as headmaster from 1996 to 2012. He was Form Master for Classes 1989, 1997 and 2003. He was first elected abbot of Our Lady of Dallas on February 15, 2012.

Moving from city to city during his early childhood because of his father’s work in the oil industry, Fr. Peter’s family returned to Dallas and their families in 1963. At first he attended the same parochial school his parents had once attended, until he transferred to the newly founded Cistercian Preparatory School. As a student in the Prep School, he was able to spend a year at a Cistercian school in Austria, where the headmaster was a personal friend of Fr. Denis, the headmaster of Cistercian in Dallas. During that year in Austria, 1972, his form master and a classmate from Dallas visited and took him to Hungary for the first time, where he met the saintly Abbot Wendelin, the former abbot of Zirc who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Communists. Having suffered so much and in his old age living under house arrest in a Benedictine monastery, Abbot Wendelin was still a religious of striking dignity, authority, and kindness. Though barred by the Communists from exercising direct leadership of the monks under his authority, Abbot Wendelin still followed in detail the lives of his monks – including the lives of the students at the school run by those monks in Irving, Texas.

A member of the fourth class to graduate from Cistercian, Fr. Peter went to Bowdoin College in Maine, where he studied Classics, and took advantage of the many opportunities for hiking, backpacking, and canoeing in New England. The call to enter Cistercian monastic life persisted, and he left Bowdoin after his sophomore year, hoping to join a community of men who shared a passionate desire for God and a love of learning and teaching. He finished his undergraduate studies in Classics at the University of Dallas in 1977, and, in addition to studying theology for the priesthood, he eventually obtained an MA in English from UT Arlington and an MA in Classics from University of Washington. As a monk he has also enjoyed the opportunity to continue his interest in backpacking and fly-fishing, particularly in New Mexico and Colorado.