Saint Benedict, Abbot & Father of Western Monasticism
Saint Benedict, blessed by grace as his
prophetic name seemed to foretell, was born of a noble Italian family
in Umbria, in the year 480. As a boy he showed great inclination for
virtue, and maturity in his actions. He was sent to Rome at the age
of seven, to be placed in the public schools. At the age of fourteen,
alarmed by the licentiousness of the Roman youth, he fled to the
desert mountains of Subiaco, forty miles from Rome, and was directed
by the Holy Spirit into a deep, craggy, and almost inaccessible cave,
since known as the Holy Grotto. He lived there for three years,
unknown to anyone save a holy monk named Romanus, who clothed him
with the monastic habit and brought him food.
He was eventually discovered, when, one
Easter day, God advised a priest who lived about four miles from
there, to take food to His servant, who was starving. The priest
searched in the hills and finally found the solitary, and they took
their meal together. Some shepherds also knew of his retreat, and
soon the fame of this hermit's sanctity began to spread. The demon
persecuted him, but to no avail; when a temptation of the flesh
assailed him, he rolled in a clump of thorns and nettles, and came
out of it covered with blood but sound in spirit.
Disciples came to him, and under his
direction, numerous monasteries were founded. The rigor of the rule
he drew up, however, brought upon him the hatred of some of the
monks, and one of them mixed poison with the Abbot's drink. When the
Saint made the sign of the cross on the poisoned bowl, it broke and
fell in pieces to the ground.
Saint Benedict resurrected a boy whose
father pleaded for that miracle, saying Give me back my son! He
replied, Such miracles are not for us to work, but for the blessed
apostles! Why will you lay upon me a burden which my weakness cannot
bear? But finally, moved by compassion, he prostrated himself upon
the body of the child, and prayed: Behold not, O Lord, my sins, but
the faith of this man, and restore the soul which Thou hast taken
away! And the child rose up, and walked to the waiting arms of his
father. When a monk lost the iron head of his axe in a river, the
Abbot told him to throw the handle in after it, and it rose from the
river bed to resume its former place.
Six days before his death, Saint
Benedict ordered his grave to be prepared, then fell ill of a fever.
On the sixth day he asked to be carried to the chapel, and, having
received the sacred Body and Blood of Christ, with hands uplifted and
leaning on one of his disciples, he calmly expired in prayer, on the
21st of March, 543.
Little Pictorial Lives of the
Saints, a compilation based on Butler's Lives of the
Saints and other sources by John Gilmary Shea (Benziger Brothers:
New York, 1894); Les Petits Bollandistes: Vies des Saints, by
Msgr. Paul Guérin (Bloud et Barral: Paris, 1882), Vol. 3
