July 11: St. Benedict / San Benito

Today we celebrate the feastday of St. Benedict. His life revolved around two recurring themes: being in love and being on the move.

As a young man, St. Benedict fell in love with learning. To follow his love, he left his family and the familiar surroundings of his Italian village and went to seek out that learning in the schools of Rome. During this time, however, he slowly nurtured a new love, the love of “being right with God.” Eventually, this love drove him out of Rome in a search for solitude, which he found in a cave near the town of Subiaco. His years of solitude fostered the growth of yet another a love, a love of intimacy with God. This intimacy led him to abandon the austere solitary life as followers began flocking around him. He formed them into small communities of monks but eventually found himself on the move one last time to Monte Cassino, where he established his largest monastic community and finally wrote his Rule for monks.

That Rule opens with famous words taken from the Book of Proverbs, “Listen my son to the precepts of the Master…” The Rule is the fruit of St. Benedict’s loves and his journeys. Importantly, he did not come up with the precepts of his monastic Rule in one sitting, but over the journey of his lifetime.

St. Benedict insisted that the love of Christ must come before all else, finding expression within the dynamics of community life, in the love of others, where mutual obedience and care, in all humility, are lived out.

For more (from Mt. Angel Abbey in St. Benedict, OR): https://www.mountangelabbey.org/monastery/history-and-tradition/

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Los Evangelios nos aseguran que nunca estaremos solos en situaciones de dificultad porque el Espíritu Santo, el “paraklitós” (que significa “a nuestro lado”), nos asistirá siempre con su presencia y fortaleza. Así lo sintió San Benito, Abad.

El tiempo de San Benito, entre los años 480 y 550 A.D., era un tiempo de tanta dificultad y crisis. Cambió radicalmente la faz de todo el mundo de la época. El Imperio Romano se estaba derrumbando en el Oeste, y pueblos enteros estaban emigrando de continente a continente. La confusión espiritual era todavía aún mayor. 

A la Orden de monjes que San Benito fundó (Benedictinos), les legó una Regla que es modélica por su equilibrio, y atrayente a la capacidad humana. Los monasterios Benedictinos se convirtieron, para una gran parte de Europa, en centros de civilización y cultura.

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San Benito creía firmemente en la importancia de equilibrar la oración con el trabajo, de mantener el balance entre lo espiritual y lo cotidiano. Su lema “Ora et Labora” (reza y trabaja) es una frase que no solo forma parte de la vida de los monjes Benedictinos, sino que invita a todos los cristianos a integrar la oración y el trabajo como pilares de su vida diaria.