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Saint Benedict
by
In the efforts of Benedict to combine the life of unselfish service with intellectual appreciation of classic literature, he naturally was misunderstood. Several times he came near having serious collisions with the authorities of the Church at Rome.
His preaching attracted the jealous attention of certain churchmen, but as he was not a priest, the Pope refused to take notice of his supposed heresies.
An effort was made to compel him to become a priest, but Benedict refused on the plea that he was not worthy. The fact was, however, that he did not wish to be bound by the rules of the Church.
In one sense, his was a religion inside a religion, and a slight accident might have precipitated an opposition denomination, just as the Protestant issue of Luther was an accident, and the Methodism of the Wesleys, another.
Several times the opposition, in the belief that Benedict was an enemy of the Church, went so far as to try to kill him. And once a few pious persons in Rome induced a company of wanton women to go out to Benedict’s monastery and disport themselves through his beautiful grounds. This was done with two purposes in view; one was to work the direct downfall of the Benedictines, with the aid of the trulls, and the other was to create a scandal among the visitors, who would carry the unsavory news back to Rome and supply the gossips raw stock.
Benedict was so deeply grieved by the despicable trick that he retired to his former home, the cave in the hillside, and there remained without food for a month.
But during this time of solitude his mind was busy with new plans. He now founded Monte Cassino. The site is halfway between Rome and Naples, and the white, classic lines of the buildings can be seen from the railroad. There on the crags, from out of a mass of green, has been played out for more than a thousand years the drama of religious life. Death by fire and sword has been the fate of many of the occupants. But the years went by, new men came, the ruins were repaired, and again the cloisters were trodden by pious feet of holy men. Goths, Lombards, Saracens, Normans, Spaniards, Teutons, and finally came Napoleon Bonaparte, who confiscated the property, making the place his home for a brief space. Later he relented and took it from the favorite upon whom he had bestowed it and gave it back to the Church. It then remained a Benedictine monastery until the edict of Eighteen Hundred Sixty-six, which, with the help of Massini and Garibaldi, made the monastery in Italy a thing of the past. The place is now a school–a school with a co-ed proviso. Thus passes away the glory of the world, in order that a greater glory shall appear.
Six hundred years before Benedict’s day, on the site of the cloister of Monte Cassino stood a temple to Apollo, and just below was a grove sacred to Venus.
Two hundred years before Benedict’s time the Goths had done their work so well that even the walls of the temple to Apollo were razed, and the sacred grove became the home of wild beasts.
To this deserted place came Benedict and eleven men, filled with a holy zeal to erect on this very spot an edifice worthy of the living God. Here the practical builder and the religious dreamer combined. If you are going to build a building, why not build upon the walls already laid and with blocks ready hewn and fashioned!
The Monte Cassino monastery of Benedict rivaled in artistic beauty the temple that it replaced.
Man is a building animal, and the same Creative Energy that impelled the Greeks and later the Romans to plan, devise, toil and build, now played through the good monk Benedict. His desire to create was a form of the great Cosmic Urge, that lives eternally and is building in America a finer, better and nobler religion than the world has ever seen–a Religion of Humanity–a religion of which at times Benedict caught vivid passing glimpses, as one sees at night the landscape brilliantly illumined by the lightning’s flash.