Saint Benedict
Father of the monks of the West, patron of Europec. 480–c. 547
Feast · July 11; a feast in Europe
- Where to pray
- Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Ligugé
- Patron of
- Europe, proclaimed by Saint Paul VI on October 24, 1964.
Life
The main source for the life of Benedict is the second book of the Dialogues of Pope Saint Gregory the Great. Benedict was born about 480 at Nursia, now Norcia, in Umbria, to a well-to-do family, who sent him to study in Rome. Put off by the dissolute lives of many of his fellow students, he left before finishing his studies and spent a short time with a community at Enfide, now Affile.
He then lived alone for three years in a cave at Subiaco, later the monastery of the Sacro Speco, where according to Saint Gregory he overcame the temptations of self-assertion, sensuality and anger, and afterward founded his first monasteries in the valley of the Anio near Subiaco. In 529 he moved to Monte Cassino. There he wrote his Rule, which describes the monastery as a school for the service of the Lord; speaking of the Divine Office, chapter 43 asks, “let nothing be preferred to the Work of God.” Its Prologue warns, “The Lord is waiting every day for us to respond to his holy admonitions by our deeds.” He died on March 21, 547.
On October 24, 1964, the day he consecrated the abbey of Monte Cassino, rebuilt after its destruction by Allied bombing in 1944, Pope Saint Paul VI proclaimed Benedict patron of all Europe in the apostolic letter Pacis nuntius. In the countries of Europe his day, July 11, is kept as a feast.
Further reading: Gregorian Chant in France: Monasteries Open to Pilgrims.
Cult and relics
The abbey of Fleury, on the Loire upstream from Orléans, was founded in the middle of the seventh century by Leodebaldus, abbot of Saint-Aignan in Orléans, on the Gallo-Roman estate of Floriacum. According to its tradition, Abbot Mommolus had the relics of Saint Benedict brought there from Monte Cassino, which lay ruined after the Lombard raids, and Britannica dates their arrival to about 672. The place then took the name of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. The monks of Monte Cassino reject the account and hold that the relics never left their abbey. At Fleury the relics rest in the great central pillar of the crypt, which dates from 1067. After a fire in 1026 the church was rebuilt in the Romanesque style, with a porch tower resting on fifty columns, and King Philip I, who died in 1108, is buried in the choir. The community was scattered at the Revolution, and a monk served the parish disguised as a secular priest. The church was listed as a historic monument in 1840. Benedictine monks returned in 1944, and the abbey belongs today to the Subiaco Congregation.
In art
Benedict is shown as an abbot in a black habit, holding his Rule and a crosier, sometimes with a raven or a broken cup, which recall the attempts to poison him told by Saint Gregory. At Fleury the capitals of the porch tower raised under Abbot Gauzlin are finely carved, the north portal dates from the early thirteenth century, and the crypt is built around the pillar that holds his relics.
Patron of
Patron of Europe, proclaimed by Saint Paul VI on October 24, 1964.
Where to pray
- Saint-Benoît-sur-LoireThe Romanesque abbey church of Fleury, where the relics venerated as his rest in the central pillar of the crypt and a Benedictine community lives by his Rule.
- LigugéThe Benedictine abbey of Saint-Martin near Poitiers, the oldest monastery known in western Europe, where monks of the Solesmes Congregation follow his Rule.
On our ways: Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire.