Monk lowers his own bread down a cliff to St. Benedict

SUBIACO, Roman Italy, about 500 AD — Every so often, a little bell rang outside a cave in a cliff in the hills of Italy. Then a loaf of bread came swinging down on a very long rope.

The young man living in the cave was Saint Benedict of Nursia. It was about 500 AD, at a wild place called Subiaco, forty miles from Rome. Only one person in the world knew he was there: the monk holding the other end of the rope.

St. Benedict had given up his studies in Rome to give his whole life to God. He wanted to live as far from people as he could.

The cave he picked was only about ten feet deep. He could cross it in a few steps. Its opening was a big triangle. Above it the mountain went almost straight up. Below it, the ground dropped about 500 feet to a lake. That’s about as far as a building of forty floors is tall.

The monk at the top of the rope

On his way to Subiaco, St. Benedict met a monk called Saint Romanus on the road. St. Romanus asked him where he was going. Once St. Romanus understood what St. Benedict meant to do, he kept it a secret. He gave St. Benedict a monk’s habit to wear and helped him in every way he could.

St. Romanus lived with other monks in a monastery on the mountain, right above the cliff where the cave was. The monastery had its own abbot. But there was no path down to the cave, because a high rock stuck out over it.

St. Romanus found another way. On certain days he slipped away without his abbot noticing, to take St. Benedict his bread. The bread wasn’t spare. It was the loaf the monastery had given St. Romanus for his own meals.

He tied the loaf to a long rope and let it down from the top of the rock. He tied a little bell to the rope, too. Pope Saint Gregory the Great wrote down St. Benedict’s life. St. Gregory gives the reason for the bell: “that by the ringing thereof the man of God might know when he came with his bread, and so be ready to take it.” When the bell rang, St. Benedict came out of the cave. He took the loaf off the rope.

The day the bell broke

One day a loaf was on its way down. A stone came flying and smashed the bell. St. Gregory writes that the devil threw it. He calls the devil “the old enemy of mankind.” The devil was jealous, St. Gregory says, of St. Romanus’s kindness and of the food St. Benedict was getting. St. Romanus didn’t stop. St. Gregory writes: “for all that, Romanus gave not over to serve him by all the possible means he could.”

St. Romanus fed St. Benedict like this for all three years St. Benedict lived hidden in the cave. Then, St. Gregory writes, God decided “to ease Romanus of his pains.” On Easter Day, Our Lord appeared to a priest who lived a long way off. The priest had just got his Easter dinner ready. Our Lord told him that one of His servants was going hungry in a certain place. The priest took the food, searched the steep hills and valleys, and found St. Benedict in his cave.