Patron of Europe

The modern Western reception of St Benedict: his proclamation by Pope Paul VI, in the apostolic letter Pacis Nuntius of 24 October 1964, as the Principal Patron of Europe — a recognition of the civilizational role of the Rule (later joined by the co-patronage of Cyril and Methodius and others); the contested history of his relics, claimed both by Monte Cassino, where the Dialogues place his tomb, and by the abbey of Fleury (Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire), which holds that they were translated to Gaul in the seventh century; the repeated destruction and rebuilding of Monte Cassino, most recently after the Allied bombardment of 1944; and the living Benedictine and Cistercian families that carry the Rule today, gathered in the modern Benedictine Confederation.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Latin) / Orthodox reception

Patron of Europe

On 24 October 1964, at the consecration of the rebuilt basilica of Monte Cassino, Pope Paul VI issued the apostolic letter Pacis Nuntius (“Messenger of Peace”) proclaiming St Benedict the Principal Patron of Europe (patronus Europae principalis) (Paul VI, Pacis Nuntius, 24 October 1964). The act was a considered judgment about history: it recognized that Benedict, through the Rule and the monastic civilization it founded (see The Rule Conquers the West), had been one of the chief makers of Europe — that the continent’s unity, such as it was, had been forged in no small part by the Benedictine monasteries that cleared its land, copied its books, kept its learning, and Christianized its peoples. The letter named Benedict “the messenger of peace, the architect of union, the master of civilization, and above all the herald of the religion of Christ and the founder of monastic life in the West.” It was a way of saying that to understand Europe, one must understand the Rule.

Later popes broadened the patronage: in 1980 John Paul II named Saints Cyril and Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, co-patrons of Europe alongside Benedict, and in 1999 added three women — Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Edith Stein — so that Benedict now heads a college of European patrons. But he remains the first and principal of them, and the proclamation of 1964 is the formal modern recognition of what the “Benedictine centuries” had made him.

The Relics

The resting-place of Benedict’s body is a genuinely contested matter of medieval history, and the collection reports it as such. The Dialogues place his tomb on Monte Cassino, in the oratory of St John the Baptist, shared with his sister Scholastica (see The Death of Benedict). But after the Lombard destruction of the abbey (c. 577) left the site deserted for over a century, a tradition arose — recorded from the eighth century, notably by Paul the Deacon — that monks from the Gallic abbey of Fleury, on the Loire, had come to the abandoned ruins around 660–672 and translated the relics of Benedict (and, in the parallel French tradition, Scholastica to Le Mans) to Gaul. Fleury thereafter called itself Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire and became a major pilgrimage center on the strength of possessing the founder’s body.

[Disputed: The location of Benedict’s relics. The abbey of Fleury (Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire) claims that his relics were translated there from the abandoned Monte Cassino c. 660–672 (a tradition recorded by Paul the Deacon and others). Monte Cassino, restored from the eighth century, has always maintained that the relics remained on the mountain and were rediscovered there. The dispute is centuries old and unresolved; each house has long claimed the body. This collection reports the competing claims without adjudicating between them.]

The dispute matters less than the fact it illustrates: Benedict’s cult was so valuable that two great houses fought for centuries over his bones — a measure of what he had become to the medieval West.

The Mountain Destroyed and Rebuilt

Monte Cassino itself is the most eloquent monument of Benedict’s permanence, precisely because it has been destroyed so many times and rebuilt every time on the same summit. The abbey was sacked by the Lombards (c. 577), destroyed by the Saracens (883, with the abbot Bertharius martyred), levelled by an earthquake (1349), and — most famously — reduced to rubble by Allied aerial bombardment in February 1944, during one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Second World War, when the monastery on its commanding height stood athwart the road to Rome. (The monks had removed the abbey’s library and archives, and many art treasures, to safety before the bombing.) Each time, it was rebuilt. The basilica that Paul VI consecrated in 1964, when he proclaimed Benedict patron of Europe, was the post-war reconstruction, raised “as it was, where it was” (com’era, dov’era). The pattern — destruction and faithful rebuilding on the unchanged spot — has become an emblem of the durability of what Benedict began: the house falls and rises, but the Rule, and the life it shelters, go on.

There is a deeper irony in the rubble of 1944 that the tradition has not failed to notice. The abbey was destroyed in the course of a war that was, among other things, a civil war of the very Europe that Benedict is held to have helped make — a Europe tearing itself apart on the slopes of the mountain where the Rule of peace and order had been written fourteen centuries before. That Paul VI chose the rebuilt basilica, in 1964, as the place to proclaim Benedict the patron of a Europe then painfully reconstructing itself was no accident: the gesture set the architect of the old monastic unity against the memory of the continent’s self-destruction, and offered the Rule’s vision of a common, ordered, God-directed life as a sign of what Europe might yet recover. The mountain that had been a battlefield was made, again, a sign of peace.

The Living Families of the Rule

The Rule is not a historical relic but a living constitution, followed today by thousands of monks and nuns across the world. The principal modern families descending from it include:

  • The Benedictines proper — the “black monks,” organized since 1893 into the Benedictine Confederation, a loose federation of autonomous congregations of monasteries (Subiaco-Cassinese, Solesmes, the English, American, and many others), each independent, all living the Rule, under a Abbot Primate resident at Sant’Anselmo in Rome. (Benedictine monasticism has always retained the autonomy of the individual house that goes back to Benedict himself; the Confederation coordinates but does not centrally govern.)
  • The Cistercians — descended from Cîteaux (1098; see The Rule Conquers the West), today divided into the Cistercians of the Common Observance and the stricter Cistercians of the Strict Observance, the Trappists, who keep the Rule with notable austerity and silence.
  • Camaldolese, Olivetans, Sylvestrines, Vallombrosans, and other smaller congregations, all branches of the Benedictine tree; and, more loosely, Benedictine oblates — lay men and women who associate themselves with a monastery and shape their lives in the world by the spirit of the Rule.

Fifteen centuries after a young man fled the schools of Rome for a cave at Subiaco, the “little rule for beginners” he wrote on a mountain in Campania still orders the daily lives of communities on every continent — and still draws lay people, in growing numbers, to its wisdom of stability, balance, and the ordered seeking of God. This living continuity is the deepest sense in which Benedict is a father of Europe and beyond: not a monument, but a rule of life still being lived.

See Also

References

  • Paul VI. Pacis Nuntius (apostolic letter proclaiming St Benedict Principal Patron of Europe), 24 October 1964. (Date and content; “messenger of peace, architect of union, master of civilization.”)
  • John Paul II. Egregiae Virtutis (co-patrons Cyril and Methodius, 1980); Spes Aedificandi (co-patronesses, 1999). (The later college of European patrons.)
  • Paul the Deacon. Historia Langobardorum (the eighth-century witness to the Fleury translation tradition). (Used to locate the relics dispute; the competing claims reported, not adjudicated.)
  • RB 1980, ed. Timothy Fry. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. (The relics dispute; Monte Cassino’s history; the modern Benedictine Confederation.)
  • Hatch, Sister, and standard reference works on the Benedictine Confederation (founded 1893) and the Cistercian/Trappist families. (Institutional data cross-checked against the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Confederation’s own records.)