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August Peter Sidler was the son of a New York banker of German-Swiss ancestry; his mother’s family was Hungarian. He prepared for college with the Jesuits at Brooklyn Prep, going from there to the Holy Cross Fathers at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. In 1938, he graduated Bachelor of Fine Arts. He travelled in Europe after graduation from college.
Peter was clothed as a novice for Portsmouth Priory in October 1940, at St. Anselm’s Priory in Washington DC, where, because of the war, a common novitiate had been established for the two Priories dependent on Fort Augustus Abbey in Scotland. Some years later both houses became Conventual Priories and then Abbeys. Ordained in 1946, Fr. Peter became Cellarer and Treasurer in 1947, offices he held for more than fifty years. He presided over the long, slow rescue of the community’s finances from something just short of total chaos. The great expansion in the physical plant took place in his time, and his friendship with Pietro Belluschi and associated architects bore fruit in the quality of the work done.
Fr. Peter had a great knack through his whole life of relating to children, who adored him. He died of cancer, very peacefully, two days before Christmas, 1997.
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