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Final resting place for Brother Joseph, who created the art that is known as Ave Maria Grotto.This is a cemetery of only monks in residence at St. Bernard Abbey.

Ave Maria Grotto, in Cullman, Alabama, is a landscaped, 4-acre park in an old quarry on the grounds of St. Bernard Abbey, providing a garden setting for 125 miniature reproductions of some of the most famous religious structures of the world. It was added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage on February 24, 1976, and to the National Register of Historic Places on January 19, 1984.

The stone and concrete models are the work of Brother Joseph Zoettl, a Benedictine monk of St. Bernard's Abbey, who devoted some 50 years to the project, the last three decades (1932 to 1961) almost without interruption. They incorporate discarded building supplies, bricks, marbles, tiles, pipes, sea shells, marbles, plastic animals, costume jewellery, toilet bowl floats and cold cream jars.

Born in 1878 in the Kingdom of Bavaria, Brother Joseph was maimed in an accident that left him slightly hunched due to cervical kyphosis. He immigrated to the United States as a teenager, settling in northern Alabama. Soon afterward he began studying at the newly founded Benedictine monastery of St. Bernard, where he took his vows in 1897. Br. Joseph was not allowed to be ordained as a priest, due to the rule of the period that stated any man with a distracting disability could not be ordained a priest. He ran the monastery’s power plant and was, even by a monk's standards, a withdrawn, quiet man. Brother Joseph rarely left Alabama, where he died in 1961.

Photo by Jennifer Hott-Greenway

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