Building a Citadel and a Giveaway

The feast of St. Benedict

When I was growing up, St. Benedict seemed like a member of our family, a deceased beloved uncle whose presence was still strongly felt. My father, a convert to Catholicism, spent almost the entire decade of the '50’s in a Benedictine monastery. After he returned to the world, he became a Benedictine oblate (a lay member of the order) and continued to pray daily the Benedictine Office (similar to the Liturgy of the Hours) until his death in 2007. He was buried among other oblates in his monastic habit (a privilege of an oblate) in the graveyard of a Benedictine abbey.

My father would frequently read to me and my siblings from the Rule of St. Benedict of which we had as many copies as St. Benedict medals. The likeness of the Father of Western Monasticism  with a cocky raven on his shoulder (a 4-foot high painting by my artist godfather) looked gravely down upon us in our living room. I recognized my own father’s hands in the portrait as my godfather used them as a model, my father holding a broom in place of an abbatial staff. There was also a large, beautifully hand-carved, wooden statue of St. Benedict from the famous Fusek’s in Los Angeles. If you examined it carefully you could detect where his outstretched arm, raised in blessing had been reattached to his body often, the result of vigorous in-door rough-housing. The small stone St. Benedict – which for many years I wrongly thought was Moses because of his patriarchal demeanor and written scroll – fared better and stood on the shelf with books by famous Benedictine authors such as Hubert von Zeller. My father even wanted to name me, the eldest, “Scholastica” after St. Benedict’s twin sister, but my mother thankfully prevailed with the name of her own mother. I later willingly took “Scholastica” as my confirmation name.

From an early age, I knew what the initials "O.S.B." after a name meant. I knew the phrase “pray and work” (in English and Latin) as the motto of the Benedictines and that every good Benedictine worked for his bread. I knew religious order jokes, made at the expense of mendicants (“begging” orders) and upstart groups (less than 700 years old). When the wearing of brown scapulars became popular among laypeople in the 80’s, my father declined to wear one, snorting, “I’m a Benedictine, not a Carmelite.” 

So, today –  the feast of St. Benedict - is prominent in my personal history. However, St. Benedict justly looms large in Western history. In Founded on a Rock: The History of the Catholic Church, author Louis de Wohl writes of this famous monk.

Born in Nursia, Italy in 480 and sent to Rome for his studies, Benedict saw the corruption of Roman society and even of some of the priesthood. He witnessed the quarrel between two ecclesiastic factions, each with its own candidate for the papacy, and he felt that he needed solitude to give himself completely up to God. He found it in a cave in the hills near Subiaco.

Soon the people came to him to let him solve their problems for them. The monks of a nearby monastery asked him to become their abbot. But they also were corrupt and Benedict's rule was too severe for them. In the end they tried to poison him [Here, that cocky raven comes in to save his life, spilling the poisoned cup]. He left them and founded a number of monasteries of his own. When an evil priest attempted to make life impossible, he left for the South. On a steep mountain near the town of Cassinum he built a veritable fortress, a citadel of God. Here he wrote his famous Rule, one of the wisest documents of all time. It became the model for many other orders. It also revealed the character of the author - severe and yet kind, exact yet considerate, a man of supreme knowledge of human nature with all its virtues and weaknesses. He was a great sage and a great saint.

The Abbey of Monte Cassino

All around the citadel of God the Roman world crumbled. Armies marched and counter-marched past it. They fought and died and vanished, but the citadel lived on. Here, and in other Benedictine monasteries founded by St. Benedict's spiritual sons, the great theological and literary treasures of the past were copied and stored, in an age in which barbarian people overran the old centers of culture and civilization, peoples who were not only illiterate but proud of the fact. Even Kind Theodoric of the Ostrogoths, ruler, master and lawgiver of Italy, could neither read nor write. 

That today we possess not only Christian writings and indeed the Bible itself, but also the plays of Homer, Catullus and Horace, the play of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the histories of Thucydides and Livy, the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle, all the priceless heritage of Graeco-Roman thought, we owe to these monks who copied and recopied the ancient scrolls and stored them away, against the time when the outside world would be tired of barbarism and war, and would long for the world of thought.

But more important even than that, more important than anything else to St. Benedict and his sons, was the stream of prayer they sent up and are still sending up, singing, seven times a day; forming a living bridge to the land of God, giving praise to Him for His goodness, and in doing so, keeping the whole world in balance.

Benedict himself died, an old man, held upright by his monks on the right and on the left, like Moses of old, and singing the praise of God until his voice gave out. 

In honor of the feast of St. Benedict, CTP is giving away Louis de Wohl's classic Citadel of God: A Novel of St. Benedict  and The Holy Twins: Benedict and Scholastica by Tomie dePaola. To enter please leave a comment.