To consider only one aspect of the matter, there are certain religious orders that have a perennial role in the Catholic Church. They irradiate a certain spirit that is indispensable to the Church. It is a perfume that God wants His Church to have since it is a part of her very physiognomy. So God conserves those religious orders that maintain these characteristics. Other religious orders, however, which God judges as not indispensable to the Church, decline and disappear.
One finds a similar action of Divine Providence with regard to the oldest Western order, the Benedictine Order. St. Benedict is the Patriarch of the Western monks. All of Western monasticism was born from him. He founded a religious order that spread throughout Europe and worked the conversion of the barbarians in one of the worst moments of the Church’s History.
Paradoxically, the Church at this time was contaminated by the germs of corruption of the pagan world that she had helped to destroy. On one hand, the spirit of softness and sensuality of Paganism survived in many ecclesiastics and lay faithful. On the other hand, the Church had to face the barbarian invasions. For the most part, the barbarians were heretics; they were partisans of Arianism. That is to say, the Church had enemies both inside and outside.
In this crucial situation, the Benedictine monks entered the scenario and worked for the conversion of the barbarians. The conversion of England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary was due in great part to the work of the Benedictine Order. Its monks worked in a way that brought them much prestige.
What did they do? The modern missionary runs after the unfaithful and tries to convert him. The Benedictine missionary did not do this. He would go to an area without the Faith and found an abbey there. The abbey would begin its monastic life of praying and chanting the Divine Office and, at the same time, it would give alms to the poor, systematically work the lands, drain the swamps, and civilize the land surrounding the abbey. Because of the good example of the Benedictines in these different spheres, the Order exerted an enormous influence on souls. The surrounding villages would start to depend on the abbey. Sometimes populations would build towns and even cities around the abbeys.
So, the apostolate of the Order was to attract by its way of being. The people used to come to the Benedictine, and not the Benedictine to the people. I think it is a beautiful way to attract souls – they lived their own life, radiating their particular lustre and diffusing the perfume of the lives they led.
While some branches of the Benedictine Order were converting the barbarians, others were preparing the ground for the Middle Ages. All the spiritual, cultural, artistic, political and military development of the Middle Ages relied in great part on the Benedictines. Some historians sustain that the Spanish Reconquista relied on the Benedictines of Cluny, others present good arguments that the Holy Roman-German Empire would not even have been possible without Cluny. Cluny was not, properly speaking, a new branch. It was a movement inside the Order that gave new life to it. After some time, the Benedictines of Cluny also fell into decay.
Then, Divine Providence called on an English noble, who entered a declining Benedictine abbey and met two other saints who were fighting against the decadence. They left that abbey and founded another branch with a stricter discipline. It was so small and lacking in vocations that even St. Stephen had a doubt whether its foundation was really the will of God. He asked for a sign from Heaven.
Smiling, Our Lady, Mother of all the good initiatives in the Church, gave him a most beautiful sign. It was the arrival of a knight, the future St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who was accompanied by 30 companions. They came and asked to enter the new abbey.
The arrival of St. Bernard was no small thing. He is one of the suns of the Benedictine Order, one of the greatest devotees of Our Lady called the Doctor Mellifluus – the doctor who speaks on Our Lady with the sweetness of honey (from the Latin mel = honey). He was a man of penance and mortification, a polemicist and a fighter who faced hard combats against all the enemies of the Church at his time. One of them was Peter Abelard, a very bad man who I consider to be a precursor of Progressivism.
With his 30 knights St. Bernard gave splendor to the new branch of the Benedictine Order, which in its turn brought new life and vigor to the ensemble. It was a new aspect of the same vocation. What did this branch do? Complete silence, manual work, study, cloister. The life of cloister was only broken when the monks had to travel to preach a mission. They differed from the old Benedictine in this way of preaching missions. They also had a different habit. The Cistercians have a white habit with a black scapular, while the Benedictines have a black habit. The Cistercians practiced greater poverty than the Benedictines, their churches were simpler and more austere with simple stain glass. That poverty was necessary to correct the abuses produced by the former richness.
Step by step many branches of the Benedictine family recovered their fervor. The branch of Cluny, however, did not recover. It continued to decay until the French Revolution when the abbey of Cluny itself was destroyed. Almost nothing of the main building remained. The wrath of God fell over that institution and it was razed. Some buildings of the complex still exist, the relics of the founders remain in the city of Cluny, but the main part of the enormous abbey disappeared.
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Inside the Benedictine family, we saw how the Cistercians became a new branch that brought fresh life to the ensemble.
These quotes by Prof. Corrêa de Oliveira were posted to commemorate the anniversary of the visit by the Founder to Subiaco's Sacro Speco Sanctuary (photo above), a place close to Saint Benedict's heart.
