Be Like St Benedict

11 July 2025   Matthew 10:16-23

Memorial of St. Benedict, Abbot

“What you are to say will be given to you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” Matthew 10:19-20

“For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you” (Matthew 20).

What do you suppose that would sound like?

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. It could sound like the voice of St. Benedict.

Benedict of Nursia was born just four years after the western Roman Empire collapsed in A.D. 476. In those days, Rome was a hot, steaming mess. It still had some of the outward signs of a functioning government – Senators, Consuls and other officials of the state – but there wasn’t a whole lot of governing, and people largely did whatever they pleased. Licentiousness was rampant, and many of the people who were really interested in living an authentic Christian life simply withdrew to the many monasteries that had popped up in the countryside around Rome. Benedict withdrew to live as a hermit in a cave near Subiaco, about 40 miles east of Rome. He developed a reputation for sanctity, and was persuaded to become abbot of one of the nearby monasteries. But the hot, steaming mess was in some of the monasteries, too. Some of the monks objected to Benedict’s reforming ideas, and one even tried to poison him. So, he declared a pox on them all, and went back to his cave. So great had his reputation for sanctity become, however, that a crowd of his disciples came to Subiaco, and persuaded Benedict to lead them. Eventually he founded 12 monasteries in that region.

In 529 A.D. Benedict founded the famous monastery of Monte Cassino, and there he wrote his famous Rule, and it was the Rule of St. Benedict that saved Europe. In time, Benedictine monasteries became centers of culture, agriculture, medicine and hospitality. They didn’t set out to start copying the literary works of Roman and Greek antiquity, but so many boys turned up at monastery schools that monks started copying these works, as well as copies of the Bible and the Church Fathers, and that is why we have them today. It was the Benedictines who gave Europe a stable Christian culture which in time created the university system, modern science and medicine, and ideas like human and civil rights.

What will it sound like when the Spirit of God speaks through us as we confront a decadent and decaying society? It won’t be like some voice from the clouds, disembodied thundering like the dubbing of a Hollywood sound engineer. It may sound more like St. Benedict. It may sound more like people who are trying to clean up a hot, steaming mess, people speaking in the accent of a very particular tradition informed by a very close reading of the Bible. It may sound like people who are experienced in confronting opposition, and are ready when people ask us to account for the hope that is in us (I Peter 3:15). It may sound like people who are prepared to create the next institutions that will lift, advance, and bless the culture.

Assuming we want to be those people, we need to do what St. Benedict did, and cultivate an orderly life that makes time daily not just for work, but also for study and prayer, who understand why they call it “doomscrolling” and so have a rational relationship with information technology, who find in the Bible an answer for the dull ennui and psychic despair that is the daily bread of so many young people.

It's not like this hasn’t happened before. We need to sound more like the people who have done this already. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has said it well:

If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict. (After Virtue, p. 263).