Saint Benedict

From that silent cave, he wrote a short Rule full of wisdom and balance. That Rule gave birth to a network of thousands of Benedictine monasteries stretching across Europe.

Wherever his monasteries rose, swamps were cleared into fields of grain, classical books were copied and preserved, the poor were fed, and justice and order were rebuilt.

That great father is Saint Benedict of Nursia (Benedetto da Norcia), honored through the ages as the “Father of Western monasticism” and the patron of all Europe.

As a young man, he was sent by his parents to Rome to study law and classical literature. But as soon as he arrived, Benedict was shocked and disgusted by the dissolute lives of the young men his age.

There he worked a miracle, mending his nurse’s broken earthenware sieve, and people began flocking to praise him. So Benedict fled alone, deeper into the wild valley of Subiaco.

For three long years, Benedict lived completely alone in that cave, known to no one but the monk Romanus. From time to time Romanus would tie a piece of bread to a rope with a small bell on it and lower it from a ledge above.

In that silence, Benedict fought fierce inner battles. Once, the image of a woman he had known in Rome rose up in his mind and inflamed him with such desire that he thought of leaving the cave and going back to the world.

Word of his holiness spread. Shepherds found him, and later the monks of the nearby monastery of Vicovaro, having just lost their superior, begged him to come and be their abbot. Benedict at first refused, knowing their way of life did not suit his, but at their insistence he agreed.

He calmly rose and said to them:

“May God forgive you, brothers; I told you beforehand that my way of life did not suit you!”

Then he went quietly back to his cave at Subiaco.

At Subiaco, young men came from everywhere asking to follow him. Benedict organized them into twelve small monasteries, each of twelve monks under the guidance of an abbot.

But a jealous local priest named Florentius sent him poisoned bread and hired loose women to dance outside the monastery door to stir up trouble. For the sake of peace in the community, Benedict decided to leave.

He smashed the pagan altar, cut down the sacred grove and built the Abbey of Monte Cassino, the great cradle of Western monasticism.

It was at Monte Cassino that Benedict wrote his great work, the Rule of Saint Benedict (Regula Benedicti), in seventy-three short chapters.

Unlike the very severe rules of the Eastern monks, the Rule of Saint Benedict is marked by wisdom, moderation and a deep sense of human balance. Monastic life is summed up in the famous motto “Ora et Labora”: Pray and Work. The monastery is seen as a “school of the Lord’s service” and a “family home”, where the abbot is a kind yet firm father who knows how to support the weak and correct the stubborn. The monks’ day is divided in a balanced rhythm: the Divine Office prayed in common, reading and meditating on God’s word, and work with hands or mind. He gave special care to the elderly, the sick and guests:

“All guests who come to the monastery are to be welcomed as Christ.”

In 542 Totila, the brutal king of the Goths who was ravaging Italy, heard of his fame and came to Monte Cassino to test him. The king had one of his generals put on magnificent royal robes and lead his retinue into the monastery, pretending to be the king.

But Benedict, who was sitting and reading, saw the general from far off and called out:

“My son, take off those clothes, they are not yours!”

Astonished and afraid, King Totila came in person and fell at his feet. Benedict sternly rebuked the king:

“You have done much evil and caused so much grief! Stop your cruelty! You will enter Rome, you will cross the sea to Sicily, you will reign nine more years, and in the tenth year you will die!”

At their meeting early in 547, when night had fallen and Benedict got up to return to the monastery because the Rule forbade monks to spend the night outside, Scholastica begged him to stay. When he refused, she laid her head on the table and prayed, weeping.

At once a violent thunderstorm broke out, and Benedict could not set foot outside the door. Amazed, he cried:

“What have you done?”

Scholastica smiled and answered:

“I asked you and you refused; I asked God and He heard me at once!”

Saint Gregory the Great later remarked that the sister could do more than the brother, because she loved more.

Three days later, while praying in his room, Benedict saw his sister’s soul rising to heaven in the form of a white dove. He sent his brothers to bring her body back and buried her in the very tomb he had prepared for himself.

Not long afterwards, sensing that his own hour had come, Benedict had the tomb opened. For six days he burned with a high fever.

For nearly fourteen hundred years afterwards, the shared tomb of brother and sister rested in the sanctuary of Monte Cassino, until one terrible day in the twentieth century. On February 15, 1944, in the middle of the Second World War, more than a hundred Allied bombers dropped over a thousand tons of bombs on the hill, reducing almost the entire abbey to rubble. Tragically, the Germans were not actually inside the monastery, as Allied intelligence had wrongly believed. Yet amid that terrible devastation, a shell that landed right by the tomb of Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica did not explode. After the war, the monks found the relics of brother and sister intact among the ruins, and years of rebuilding raised Monte Cassino from the ashes.

The Saint Benedict medal (Crux Sancti Patris Benedicti), bearing the initials of the famous prayer of exorcism “Vade retro Satana” (“Begone, Satan!”), is treasured and worn by believers everywhere as a sign of peace and protection against evil.

“Ora et Labora”, Pray and Work: these are still the two strong wings that lift the soul above every storm of its time.