St. Benedict (480-547) lived in a historical period of great change: the Roman Empire was collapsing and there was a growing need to rebuild the community and man. “He built with his disciples a small Christian city in which ruled love, obedience, innocence, a spirit free from material things and the art of using them well, the primacy of the spirit and peace,” said Paul VI, proclaiming him the Patron of Europe.
With St. Benedict, monastic life was born in the East and around it, a social fabric, a net of relationships, a human attitude that in patience and tenacity, would produce writers, Popes, men of culture and governors.
What is incredible about his life is the fact that he did not dream up his own project of reconstruction, but simply delineated a new man who could perceive all of reality as part of the singular face of Christ. Conversion thus became prayer, prayer, song, study of literature and Scripture, a sense of spaces, architectural construction and painting, working the earth, a sense of nutrition and cultivation.
It is not the “best” of the person, nor even the good he can bring, but the totality of the person.
The essence of the message of St. Benedict and the originality of His institution reside in the new form that he himself created, the synthesis between the cross, the book and the plow. In a world of fighting and violence, the wisdom of the cross brought persons of varying ages, cultures, languages and mentalities together under the same roof. In a Benedictine community, all were welcomed, slaves and free, Romans and barbarians, learned and ignorant. Educational wisdom is knowing how to find a place in which each person can collaborate in the unity of the design. The rock must be squared up, something must be left behind, something else brought into relief, but in substances each person could be recognized in his own place and with his own contribution. It is not the “best” of the person, nor even the good he can bring, but the totality of the person. The strength of St. Benedict was to allow all persons, with their problems and their exaltant richness, to participate in a common work.
We are called to live something similar today. The expression “monastic bone-structure” describes, in fact, the heart of the life of the houses of the Fraternity of St. Charles and the foundation of their mission.
St. Benedict is the patron of Europe precisely because of the enormous historical transformation brought about by the way of living he gave rise to, for the missionary impetus that he lived. He changed thousands and thousands of men, who probably would have participated in the destruction of their society, into persons who improved the world. In order for this to happen, it is necessary that men open themselves to the action of the Spirit: welcoming concretely the historical form in which God places us and lets us be formed by, in a continuous and fruitful encounter of our own freedom and the freedom of God. Definitively, the contribution that Christianity can give to the transformation of the world is the change of the heart of man. And exactly as St. Benedict taught us, who first renewed a continent and then the entire world, it is a change that, through grace, is still possible today.
