St Benedict is considered not only to be founder of the Order of St Benedict but also the founder of western monasticism, the patriarch of western monks, and since 24 October 1964, he has also been a Patron Saint of Europe. This is because Blessed Pope Paul VI, like so many others down the centuries, had recognised “the marvellous work the saint achieved with his Rule for the formation of the civilisation and culture of Europe”, according to Pope Benedict XVI a man who chose the saint as the patron of his pontificate.
Most of what we know about the life of St Benedict comes from the Dialogues of St Gregory the Great, himself a monk before he became pope. Benedict was of “good birth”, born in 480 in the ancient Sabine town of Nursia in modern-day Italy. He had a twin sister, Scholastica, who herself became a saint. In his early teens he was sent to Rome to be educated but there he was repulsed by the dissolution and licentiousness that he witnessed in the historical twilight of the Empire. He wanted “only to please God”, St Gregory tells us, and probably at the age of 19, he left the parental home for the mountains near the village of Enfide, some 30 miles from Rome, and afterwards to Subiaco where he lived for three years in a large cave in total isolation.
It was at Subiaco that the saint entered and completed a period of maturation, where “he bore and overcame the three fundamental temptations of every human being: the temptation of self-affirmation and the desire to put oneself at the centre, the temptation of sensuality, and, lastly, the temptation of anger and revenge”. St Benedict emerged from his seclusion a man of peace, in full control of the drive of his ego and with his soul tranquilised. With disciples gathering around him, he set about founding the first of his first monasteries in the nearby Valley of the Anio.
During this period, St Benedict founded 12 wood-built monasteries each housing 12 monks, and each with their own prior. There was no Rule at that time and the monks would seek to grow in holiness by imitating the example of the saint.
Benedict’s reputation for sanctity – and for miracles – spread throughout the region and the monasteries flourished but in the year 529, he suddenly left Subiaco and settled in Monte Cassino, a plateau on the boundaries of Campania. Some hagiographies, including Butler’s Lives of the Saints, have attributed his sudden departure as an escape from the intrigues of a malicious and jealous local priest who was disrupting monastic life. But among those to dismiss this theory is Pope Benedict XVI who has pointed out the significance of the saint not returning to Subiaco once the mischievous cleric had died.
Instead, the Pope proposed that St Benedict was entering “a new phase of inner maturity and monastic experience”, one in which he envisaged a monastery as having a public purpose in the life of the Church and of society by giving “visibility to the faith as a force of life”.
St Benedict laid the foundations of his new monastery – the most famous abbey in the world until its destruction during the Second World War – on the site of a temple of Apollo after first converting the local pagans to Christianity.
Again, disciples flocked to him but this time he gathered them into a single community and together they extended their charity and hospitality to the population of the surrounding countryside, an abiding characteristic of the Benedictine order down the centuries, including in our own country. The monks cared for the dying and healed the sick, they fed the hungry in times of famine and they gave alms to the poor.
It was at Monte Cassino that on 21 March 547, shortly after receiving the Blessed Sacrament for the final time, St Benedict died while he was standing at prayer in his chapel, his hands raised to heaven, and where he was buried in the abbey in a grave beside that of his twin sister, St Scholastica.
His earthly life was over but his work and his Rule became “an authentic spiritual leaven” which, following the fall of the Roman Empire, helped to create the cultural and spiritual unity which in turn became the reality which we now call “Europe”.
The life of St Benedict itself was distinguished principally, however, by his search for God. St Gregory demonstrated that it was steeped in an atmosphere of prayer – our union with God and the means by which we experience Him – and this did not serve to remove St Benedict from the world but rather anchored him productively in it, helping him to meet his duties of daily life and the service of his neighbour. To St Benedict, prayer and work went hand in hand.
During a General Audience of 2008, Pope Benedict explained that by “seeing God”, the saint “understood the reality of man and his mission. In his Rule he describes monastic life as ‘a school for the service of the Lord’ and advises his monks, ‘let nothing be preferred to the work of God’.
“However, Benedict states that in the first place prayer is an act of listening, which must then be expressed in action,” the Pope continued, “thus, the monk’s life becomes a fruitful symbiosis between action and contemplation, ‘so that God may be glorified in all things’”, as the saint had said himself.
Furthermore, the obedience of the disciple must correspond with the wisdom of the Abbot who, in the monastery, “is believed to hold the place of Christ”. The figure of the Abbot in the Rule as a tender father but a strict teacher, a “true educator” who serves rather than rules, could be considered a self-portrait of St Benedict, since, as St Gregory wrote, “the holy man could not teach otherwise than as he himself lived”.
The Rule of St Benedict was considered by the saint as “minimal, just an initial” outline but its “illuminating power”, as Pope Benedict described it, has borne fruit for 1,500 years and it continues to bear fruit today. This once led St Gregory to present Benedict as a “luminous star” who helped to point the way out of the “black night of history”, as Pope St John Paul II described the turbulence of those times. The legacy of St Benedict, our founding father, is at the service of all those people today who seek guidance on their journey toward God and of a Europe which once again is in search of its own identity.