Water rises on the rock above Subiaco after St. Benedict prays

SUBIACO, Roman Italy, around 520 AD — There is water at the top of the mountain above Subiaco, on the bare crags where three of Saint Benedict of Nursia’s monasteries stand and where until now there was not a drop. The monks of those three houses had been spending most of every day going down to the lake on the valley floor and hauling water back up. St. Benedict sent them to dig at the top of their own mountain instead, and the water was there.

They had not asked him for a well. The monks had asked St. Benedict for permission to take the three houses down to the lake and build them again beside the water. The permission was his to give, because he had built the twelve monasteries above Subiaco, three of them on those crags, and put a superior over each one. He kept a few monks with him at his own house. St. Benedict was about forty, and his own community lived in a standing building of the old imperial villa.

The whole place was named for a lake — Sublaqueum (beneath the lake). It lay in the bottom of the valley, where a cold, clear spring rose and widened out before running on as a river.

The monks reckoned they were risking their lives every time they went down for water. So they talked it over among themselves and went to St. Benedict together, all of them saying the same thing. “Questo scendere ogni dì fino al lago per acqua va oltre alle nostre forze; sposta più basso i nostri monasteri” (This going down to the lake every day for water is beyond our strength; move our monasteries lower), they told him.

He answered them gently and sent them home with nothing.

That night, in the dark, he took St. Placid by the hand — a boy of about seven, given to him by a Roman family to bring up in his own house — and walked him up to the top of the rock where the three houses stood. Nobody went with them, and nobody was told. On the top St. Benedict prayed for a long time. When he had finished he picked up three stones, stacked them one on top of another on the spot where he had prayed, and went back down to his own monastery.

The next day the monks came to him again with the same complaint. This time he sent them up the mountain. “Go your way to the rock, and in the place where you find three stones laid one upon another, dig a little hole, for almighty God is able to bring forth water in the top of that mountain, and so to ease you of that great labour which you take in fetching it so far,” St. Benedict told them.

They climbed and found the three stones where he had said they would be. The rock around them was wet, covered all over in drops of water. They took a spade to it and cut a hollow in the stone, and the hollow filled the moment it was open. The water came out so fast that it overflowed and ran away downhill, and it is running still, from the top of that mountain to the bottom of it.