Tim Oberholzer

Tim Oberholzer is Executive Director of the Center for Benedictine Life. In addition to managing the operations of the CBL, Tim facilitates in-person retreats and on-line programs. Tim also accompanies others as a spiritual director.
Tim spent five and a half years as a Trappist monk at New Melleray Abbey in Peosta, Iowa. Deep prayer and reflection led him to leave the community prior to making solemn profession. He moved to Idaho to be closer to his parents, discovering the Monastery of St. Gertrude through a job posting for the innkeeper position at the Inn at St. Gertrude.
Tim earned a business degree from the University of Notre Dame, studied philosophy and theology at the University of St. Thomas, and completed the Stewards of the Mystery spiritual direction training program.
Tim is a remarried widower, a committed runner, and an avid reader.
Events with Tim Oberholzer

May 19 - 23, 2025
What is sacred space? How do you enter it? What are you being invited into? How will you greet the Divine shining through this transparent world? The Center for Benedictine Life at the Monastery of St. Gertrude welcomes the monastery of your heart. Here, the quest within and the world without join hands. Prompts of the Spirit and their counterparts in key moments, find a voice in the sanctuary of your journal, the sanctuary of the heart. Journaling, Joan Chittister says, is an “x-ray of your soul.” It gets beneath our facades to the bone, blood, tissue, and the spiritual…