Saint Benedict of Nursia

St. Benedict was born about 480 AD in the province of Nursia, high in the Umbrian mountains. His father was named Eutropius and his grandfather Justinian. A tradition which St. Bede accepts makes him the twin of his sister St. Scholastica.

In the first flower of his youth he was sent from Nursia to Rome for the liberal studies, and lived there with his parents. St. Gregory the Great explains that the young student was put off by the dissolute lifestyle of many of his fellow students, and did not wish to make the same mistakes. Before finishing his studies he gave over his book and forsook his father's house and wealth.

He did not leave Rome to become a hermit, and his old nurse went with him as a servant. The two stopped at a place called Enfide and stayed at the church of St. Peter, in the company of other virtuous men. There the nurse borrowed an earthenware wheat-sifter and broke it.

St. Benedict took away both pieces, fell to his prayers in tears, and rose to find the vessel whole. The townsmen hung it over the church door, where it still hung many years later. The notice this brought him drove him to a desert place called Sublacum, almost forty miles from Rome.

On the road a monk, Saint Romanus, met him, kept his purpose secret, and gave him the monk's habit. St. Romanus cut bread from his own meals and let it down the cliff on a line, with a bell tied to the cord. St. Benedict lived three years in a narrow cave above the river Anio, unknown to all men but St. Romanus.

Pope Pius XII writes that he strove there for three years to acquire the perfection and holiness of the Gospels. Shepherds came on the cave, saw his apparel made of skins through the bushes, and took him at first for a beast. He threw himself into a thicket of briars and nettles to master a violent temptation of the flesh.

A monastery near the cave lost its abbot, and the whole community came and entreated him to take its government. He told them their manners and his would not agree, and consented only when they pressed him. St Gregory the Great records that some of the monks, chafing under his government, agreed to poison his wine.

At table he made the sign of the cross over the glass, and it broke in pieces though he held it far off. He left the house and went back to the wilderness he loved, and dwelt alone with himself in the sight of his Creator.

Many began to abandon the world and become his scholars, and Roman nobles commended their children to him. About 520 AD he built the house below his grotto that became the Abbey of St. Scholastica, endowed by the patricians Tertullus and Aequitius. Twelve of the fourteen Benedictine monasteries around Subiaco were built by St. Benedict.

In 522 AD two senators, Equitius and Tertullus, gave him their sons: St. Maurus, then twelve years old, and St. Placidus, still a child. Tradition preserved by Pope Saint Gregory the Great holds that St. Maurus ran over the lake at his command and drew the drowning St. Placidus out by the hair.

In 529 AD St. Benedict left Subiaco to escape the persecutions of the jealous priest Florentius. A chosen band went with him to Monte Cassino, among them St. Maurus and St. Placid. He reached the mountain on February 27, 529 AD, the first day of Lent, and shut himself in for the forty days.

There he wrote the Rule under which his monks lived. In its last chapter he calls it a minimum Rule written for beginners. It orders that all guests who come be received as Christ, and that the sick be served as Christ himself.

A famine struck Italy and Campania in 539 AD, and the starving came up to the abbey. The next day the door was opened on some two hundred bushels of flour lying in sacks, and no one learned who had brought them.

Tradition carried by Pope Saint Gregory the Great holds that on the night of October 29, 540 AD he stood at his window and saw the whole world gathered in a single ray of light. Marching through Campania in 542 AD, Totila, King of the Goths, sent word ahead and came to Monte Cassino. Pope Saint Gregory the Great reports that St. Benedict reproved the king and told him how long he had to reign.

His sister St. Scholastica came to him once a year, and he went down to meet her at a property of the monastery near the gate. Abbot Tosti records that at their last meeting the storm her prayer had raised made it impossible for him to return to his monastery, so that he stayed against his will and the two spent the whole night in spiritual conversation.

In his last illness, on the sixth day, he commanded his monks to carry him into the oratory. There he received the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ. He died standing, his own hands lifted up, his weak body held between the hands of his disciples.

Pope Benedict XVI dates the death to March 21, 547 AD. He was buried at Monte Cassino in one tomb with his sister, St. Scholastica. Pope Paul VI declared him the principal heavenly Patron of all Europe on October 24, 1964 AD, the day he consecrated the rebuilt church of Monte Cassino.