Catholic Encyclopedia - The Benedictine Order (2024)

The Benedictine Order comprises monks living under the Rule of St. Benedict,and commonly known as black monks. The order will be considered in thisarticle under the following sections:

I. History of the Order;
II. Lay brothers, Oblates, Confraters, and Nuns;
III. Influence and Work of the Order;
IV. Present Condition of the Order;
V. Benedictines of Special Distinction;
VI. Other Foundations Originating from, or Based upon, the Order.

I. HISTORY OF THE ORDER

The term Order as here applied to the spiritual family of St. Benedict isused in a sense differing somewhat from that in which it is applied to otherreligious orders. In its ordinary meaning the term implies one completereligious family, made up of a number of monasteries, all of which are subjectto a common superior or general who usually resides either in Rome or in themother-house of the order, if there be one. It may be divided into variousprovinces, according to the countries over which it is spread, each provincialhead being immediately subject to the general, just as the superior of eachhouse is subject to his own provincial. This system of centralized authority hasnever entered into the organization of the Benedictine Order. There is nogeneral or common superior over the whole order other than the pope himself, andthe order consists, so to speak, of what are practically a number of orders,called congregations, each of which is autonomous; all are united, not underthe obedience to one general superior, but only by the spiritual bond ofallegiance to the same Rule, which may be modified according to thecirc*mstances of each particular house or congregation. It is in this lattersense that the term Order is applied in this article to all monasteriesprofessing to observe St. Benedict's Rule.

Beginnings of the Order

St. Benedict did not, strictly speaking, found an order; we have no evidencethat he ever contemplated the spread of his Rule to any monasteries besidesthose which he had himself established. Subiaco was his original foundation andthe cradle of the institute. From St. Gregory we learn that twelve othermonasteries in the vicinity of Subiaco also owed their origin to him, and thatwhen he was obliged to leave that neighbourhood he founded the celebrated Abbeyof Monte Cassino, which eventually become the centre whence his Rule andinstitute spread. These fourteen are the only monasteries of which there is anyreliable evidence of having been founded during St. Benedict's lifetime. Thetradition of St. Placid's mission to Sicily in 534, which first gained generalcredence in the eleventh century, though accepted as genuine by such writers asMabillon and Ruinart, is now generally admitted to be mere romance. Very littlemore can be said in favour of the supposed introduction of the Benedictine Ruleinto Gaul by St. Maurus in 543, though it also has been strenuously upheld bymany responsible writers. At any rate, evidences for it are so extremelydoubtful that it cannot be seriously regarded as historical. There is reason forbelieving that it was the third Abbot of Monte Cassino who began to spread aknowledge of the Rule beyond the circle of St. Benedict's own foundations. It isat least certain that when Monte Cassino was sacked by the Lombards about theyear 580, the monks fled to Rome, where they were housed by Pope Pelagius II ina monastery adjoining the Lateran Basilica. There, in the very centre of theecclesiastical world, they remained for upwards of a hundred and forty years,and it seems highly probable that this residence in so prominent a positionconstituted an important factor in the diffusion of a knowledge of Benedictinemonasticism. It is generally agreed also that when Gregory the Great embracedthe monastic state and converted his family palace on Apostle, it was theBenedictine form of monachism that he adopted there.

It was from the monastery of St. Andrew in Rome that St. Augustine, the prior,and his forty companions set forth in 595 on their mission for theevangelization of England, and with them St. Benedict's idea of the monasticlife first emerged from Italy. The arguments and authorities for this statementhave been admirably marshalled and estimated by Reyner in his ApostolatusBenedictinorum in Angliâ (Douai, 1626), and his proofs have been adjudged byMabillon to amount to demonstration. [Cf. Butler, Was St. Augustine aBenedictine? in Downside Review, III (1884).] At their various stopping placesduring the journey through France the monks left behind them traditionsconcerning their rule and form of life, and probably also some copies of theRule, for we have several evidences of its having gradually introduced into mostof the chief monasteries of Gaul during the seventh century. Lérins, forinstance, one of the oldest, which had been founded by St. Honoratus in 375,probably received its first knowledge of the Benedictine Rule from the visit ofSt. Augustine and his companions in 596. Dismayed by the accounts they had heardof the ferocity of the English, the missionaries had sent their leader back toRome to implore the pope to allow them to abandon the object of their journey.During his absence they remained at Lérins. Not long after their departure,Aygulph, Abbot of Fleury, was called in to restore the discipline and heprobably introduced the full Benedictine observance; for when St. BenedictBiscop visited Lérins later on in the seventh century he received theBenedictine habit and tonsure from the hands of Abbot Aygulph. Lérins continuedthrough several centuries to supply from its monks bishops for the chiefchurches of Southern Gaul, and to them perhaps may be traced the generaldiffusion of St. Benedictine's Rule throughout that country. There, as also inSwitzerland, it had to contend with and supplement the much stricter Irish orCeltic Rule introduced by St. Columbanus and others. In or practised side byside. Gregory of Tours says that at Ainay, in the sixth century, the monksfollowed the rules of Basil, Cassian, Caesarius, and other fathers, taking andusing whatever seemed proper to the conditions of time and place, and doubtlessthe same liberty was taken with the Benedictine Rule when it reached them. Inother monasteries it entirely displaced the earlier codes, and had by the end ofthe eighth century so completely superseded them throughout France thatCharlemagne could gravely doubt whether monks of any kind had been possiblebefore St. Benedict's time. The authority of Charlemagne and of his son, Louisthe Pious, did much, as we shall presently see, towards propagating theprinciples of the Father of western monachism.

St. Augustine and his monks established the first English Benedictinemonastery at Canterbury soon after their arrival in 597. Other foundationsquickly followed as the Benedictine missionaries carried the light of the Gospelwith them throughout the length and breadth of the land. It was said that St.Benedict seemed to have taken possession of the country as his own, and thehistory of his order in England is the history of the English Church. Nowheredid the order link itself so intimately with people and institutions, secular aswell as religious, as in England. Through the influence of saintly men, Wilfrid,Benedict Biscop, and Dunstan, the Benedictine Rule spread with extraordinaryrapidity, and in the North, when once the Easter controversy had been settledand the Roman supremacy acknowledged (Synod of Whitby, 664), it was adopted inmost of the monasteries that had been founded by the Celtic missionaries fromIona. Many of the episcopal sees of England were founded and governed by theBenedictines, and no less than nine of the old cathedrals were served by theblack monks of the priories attached to them. Even when the bishop was nothimself a monk, he held the place of titular abbot, and the community formed hischapter.

Germany owed its evangelization to the English Benedictines, Sts. Willibrordand Boniface, who preached the Faith, there in the seventh and eighth centuriesand founded several celebrated abbeys. From thence spread, hand in hand,Christianity and Benedictine monasticism, to Denmark and Scandinavia, and fromthe latter even to Iceland. In Spain monasteries had been founded by theVisigothic kings as early as the latter half of the fifth century, but it wasprobably some two or three hundred years later St. Benedict's Rule was adopted.Mabillon gives 640 as the date of its introduction into that country (ActaSanctorum O. S. B., saec. I, praef. 74), but his conclusions on this point arenot now generally accepted. In Switzerland the disciples of Columbanus hadfounded monasteries early in the seventh century, two of the best known being St.Gall's, established by the saint of that name, and Dissentis (612), founded bySt. Sigisbert. The Celtic rule was not entirely supplanted by that of St.Benedict until more than a hundred years later, when the change was effectedchiefly through the influence of Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne. Bythe ninth century, however, the Benedictine had become the only form of monasticlife throughout the whole of Western Europe, excepting Scotland, Wales, andIreland, where the Celtic observance still prevailed for another century or two.At the time of the Reformation there were nine Benedictine houses in Ireland andsix in Scotland, besides numerous abbeys of Cistercians.

Benedictine monasticism never took such deep root in the eastern countries ofEurope as it had done in the West. The Bohemians and the Poles, nevertheless,owed their conversion respectively to the Benedictine missionaries Adalbert (d.997) and Casimir (d. 1058), whilst Bavaria and what is now the Austrian Empirewere evangelized first by monks from Gaul in the seventh century, and later onby St. Boniface and his disciples. A few of the larger abbeys founded in thesecountries during the ninth and tenth centuries still exist, but the number offoundations was always small in comparison with those farther west. IntoLithuania and the Eastern Empire the Benedictine Rule never penetrated in earlytimes, and the great schism between East and West effectually prevented anypossibilities of development in that direction.

Early Constitution of the Order

During the first four or five centuries after the death of St. Benedict thereexisted no organic bond of union amongst the various abbeys other than the Ruleitself and obedience to the Holy See. According to the holy legislator'sprovisions each monastery constituted an independent family, self-contained,autonomous, managing its own affairs, and subject to no external authorityexcept that of the local diocesan bishop, whose powers of control were, however,limited to certain specific occasions. The earliest departures from this systemoccurred when several of the greater abbeys began sending out offshoots, underthe form of daughter-houses retaining some sort of dependence upon the motherabbey from which they sprang. This mode of propagation, together with thevarious reforms that began to appear in the eleventh and succeeding centuries,paved the way for the system of independent congregations, still a featurepeculiar to the Benedictine Order.

Reforms

A system which comprised many hundreds of monasteries and many thousands ofmonks, spread over a number of different countries, without any unity oforganization; which was exposed, moreover, to all the dangers and disturbancesinseparable from those troublous times of kingdom-making; such a system wasinevitably unable to keep worldliness, and even worse vices, wholly out of itsmidst. Hence it cannot be denied that the monks often failed to live up to themonastic ideal and sometimes even fell short of the Christian and moralstandards. There were failures and scandals in Benedictine history, just asthere were declensions from the right path outside the cloister, for monks are,after all, but men. But there does not seem ever to have been a period ofwidespread and general corruption in the order. Here and there the members ofsome particular house allowed abuses and relaxations of rule to creep in, sothat they seemed to be falling away from the true spirit of their state, butwhenever such did occur they soon called forth efforts for a restoration ofprimitive austerity; and these constantly recurring reform movements form one ofthe surest evidences of the vitality which has pervaded the BenedictineInstitute throughout its entire history. It is important to note, moreover, thatall such reforms as ever achieved any measure of success came invariably fromwithin, and were not the result of pressure from outside the order.

The first of the reforms directed towards confederating the monastic housesof a single kingdom was set on foot early in the ninth century by Benedict ofAniane under the auspices of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Though aBenedictine himself born in Aquitaine and trained at Saint-Seine near Dijon,Benedict was imbued with the rigid austerity of the East, and in his Abbey ofAniane practiced a mode of life that was severe in the extreme. Over Louis heacquired an ascendancy which grew stronger as years went on. At his instigationLouis built for him a monastery adjoining his own palace at Aix-la-Chapelle,which was intended to serve as a model according to which all others were to bereformed, and to bring about this end Benedict was invested with a generalauthority over all the monasteries of the empire. Absolute uniformity ofdiscipline, observance, and habit, after the pattern of the royal monastery, wasthen the general scheme which was launched at an assembly of all the abbots atAachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) in 817 and embodied in a series of eighty capitulapassed by the meeting. Though by reason of the very minuteness of these capitula,which made them vexatious and ultimately intolerable, this scheme of centralizedauthority lasted only for the lifetime of Benedict himself, the capitula(printed in full in Herrgott, Vetus Disciplina Monastica, Paris, 1726) wererecognized as supplying a much needed addition to St. Benedict's Rule concerningpoints not sufficiently provided for therein, and as filling much the same placethen as the approved Constitutions of a monastery or congregation do now.

A century later, in 910, the first real reform that produced any widespreadand general effect was commenced at the Abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, under St.Berno, its first abbot. The object was an elaboration of the Benedictine ideal,for the uniform preservation of which a highly centralized system of government,hitherto unknown to Benedictine monachism, except as suggested by St. Benedictof Aniane, was introduced. It was in fact the establishment of a veritable order,in the common acceptance of that term, within the Benedictine family, the abbotof Cluny retaining an actual headship over all dependent houses, the latterbeing governed only by priors as his vicars. For two centuries or more Cluny wasprobably the chief religious influence in the Latin Church, as it was also thefirst abbey to obtain exemption from episcopal oversight. Through the efforts ofBerno's immediate successors the congregation grew apace, partly by founding newhouses and partly by incorporating those already existing, so that by thetwelfth century Cluny had become the centre and head of an order embracing some314 monasteries in all parts of Europe, France, Italy, the Empire, Lorraine,Spain, England, Scotland, and Poland. Although the congregation had its ownconstitutions and was absolutely autonomous, its members always claimed to beand were actually recognized as real Benedictines; hence it was not strictly anew order but only a reformed congregation within the order. (See CLUNY).

Following the example of Cluny, several other reforms were initiated fromtime to time in different parts during the next three centuries, which whiletaking the Rule of St. Benedict as a basis, aimed frequently at a greaterausterity of life than was practised by the black monks or contemplated by theholy Rule. Some were even semi-eremitical in their constitution, andone-Fontevrault-consisted of double monasteries, the religious of both sexesbeing under the rule of the abbess. In dealing with these reformed congregationsa distinction must be made between those which, like Cluny, continued to beconsidered as part of the main Benedictine body, and those which constitutedpractically new and independent orders, like Cîteaux, and have always beenlooked upon as outside the Benedictine confederation, though still professingthe Rule of St. Benedict in some form or other. Those of the former category aretreated here, since they and their successors constitute the order as weunderstand it at the present day. In the latter class the most important wereCamaldoli (1009), Vallombrosa (1039), Grammont (1076), Cîteaux (1098),Fontevrault (1099), Savigny (1112), Monte Vergine (1119), Sylvestrines (1231),Celestines (1254), and Olivetans (1319). All of these will be described indetail under the respective titles.

The influence of Cluny, even in monasteries which did not join itscongregation or adopt any of the other reforms mentioned above, was large andfar-reaching. Many such abbeys, including Subiaco and Monte Cassino, adopted itscustoms and practices, and modelled their life and spirit according to theexample it set. Monasteries such as these often became in turn the centres ofrevival and reform in their respective neighbourhoods, so that during the tenthand eleventh centuries there arose several free unions of monasteries based on auniform observance derived from a central abbey. These unions, the germ of thecongregational system which developed later on, deserve a somewhat detailedenumeration here. In England there had been three distinct efforts at systematicorganization. The various monasteries founded by St. Augustine and hisfellow-monks had preserved some sort of union, as was only natural with newfoundations in a pagan country proceeding from a common source of origin. AsChristianity spread through the land this necessity for mutual dependencediminished, but when St. Benedict Biscop came to England with ArchbishopTheodore in 669, it fell to him to foster a spirit of uniformity amongst thevarious Benedictine monasteries then existing. In the tenth century St. Dunstanset himself to reform the English monastic houses on the model of Fleury and ofwhat he had seen successfully carried out at Ghent during his exile in Flanders.With his co-operation St. Ethelwold brought out his Concordia Regularis, whichis interesting as an early attempt to procure a uniform observance in all themonasteries of a nation. A century later Lanfranc continued the same idea byissuing a series of statutes regulating the life of the English Benedictines. Itshould be noted here that these several attempts were directed only towardssecuring outward uniformity, and that as yet there was apparently no idea of acongregation, properly so called, with a central source of all legislativeauthority. In Fra Chaise-Dieu (Auvergne), St. Victor (Marseilles), St. Claude,Lérins, Sauve-Majour, Tiron, and Val-des-Choux, were all centres of larger orsmaller groups of houses, in each of which there was uniformity of rule as wellas more or less dependence upon the chief house. Fleury adopted the Cluniacreform, as did also St. Benignus of Dijon, though without subjection to thatorganization; and all were eventually absorbed by the congregation of St. Maurin the seventeenth century, excepting St. Claude, which preserved itsindependence until the Revolution, Val-des-Choux, which became Cistercian, andLérins, which in 1505 joined the Italian congregation of St. Justina of Padua.In Italy the chief groups had their centres at Cluse in Piedmont, at FonteAvellana, which united to the Camaldolese congregation in 1569, La Cava, whichjoined the congregation of St. Justina in the fifteenth century, and Sasso-Vivo,which was suppressed as a separate federation in the same century and its fortyhouses united to other congregations of the Benedictine family. The monasteriesof Germany were divided chiefly between Fulda and Hirschau, both of whicheventually joined the Bursfeld Union. (See BURSFELD.) In Austria there were twogroups of monasteries, the abbeys of Melk (Molck or Melek) and Salzburg beingthe chief houses. They continued thus until well into the seventeenth century,when systematic congregations were organized in compliance with the Tridentinedecrees, as well be described in due course. Other free unions, for purposes ofmutual help and similarity of discipline, were to be found also in Scotland,Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere, in which the same idea was carriedout, viz., not so much a congregation in its later sense, with a centralizedform of government, as a mere banding together of houses for the bettermaintenance of rule and policy.

Notwithstanding all these reform movements and unions of monasteries, a largenumber of Benedictine abbeys in different countries retained to the end of thetwelfth century, and even later, their original independence, and this state ofthings was only terminated by the regulations of the Fourth Lateran Council, in1215, which were to change materially the whole trend of Benedictine polity andhistory. By the twelfth canon of this council it was decreed that all themonasteries of each ecclesiastical province were to unite into a congregation.The abbots of each province or congregation were to meet in chapter every thirdyear, with power to pass laws binding on all, and to appoint from amongst theirown number visitors who were to make canonical visitation of the monasteriesand to report upon their condition to the ensuing chapter. In each congregationone of the abbots was to be elected president, and the one so chosen presidedover the triennial chapter and exercised a certain limited and well-definedauthority over the houses of his congregation, in such a way as not to interferewith the independent authority of each abbot in his own monastery. England wasthe first and for some time the only country to give this new arrangement a fairtrial. It was not until after the issue of the Bull Benedictina by BenedictXII, in 1336, that other countries, somewhat tardily, organized their nationalcongregation in conformity with the designs of the Lateran Council. Some ofthese have continued to the present day, and this congregational system is now,with very few exceptions and some slight variations in matters of detail, thenormal form of government throughout the order.

Progress of the Order

At the time of this important change in the constitution of the order, theblack monks of St. Benedict were to be found in almost every country of WesternEurope, including Iceland, where they had two abbeys, founded in the twelfthcentury, and from which missionaries had penetrated even into Greenland and thelands of the Eskimo. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the order isestimated to have comprised the enormous number of 37,000 monasteries. It had upto that time given to the Church no less than 24 popes, 200 cardinals, 7,000archbishops, 15,000 bishops, and over 1,500 canonized saints. It had enrolledamongst its members 20 emperors, 10 empresses, 47 kings, and 50 queens. Andthese numbers continued to increase by reason of the additional strength whichaccrued to the order form its consolidation under the new system. In thesixteenth century the Reformation and the religious wars spread havoc amongstit* monasteries and reduced their number to about 5,000. In Denmark, Iceland,and Sweden, where several houses had joined the German (Bursfeld) Union, theorder was entirely obliterated by the Lutherans about 1551 and its propertyconfiscated by the crown. The arbitrary rule of Joseph II of Austria (1765-90)and the French Revolution and its consequences completed the work of destruction,so that in the early part of the nineteenth century, the order numbered scarcelymore than fifty monasteries all told. The last seventy years, however, havewitnessed a remarkable series of revivals and an accession of missionaryenterprise, with the result that there are now over one hundred and fiftymonasteries of black monks, or, including affiliated congregations and conventsof nuns, a total of nearly seven hundred. These revivals and examples ofexpansion will now be treated in detail under the headings of the variouscongregations, which will bring the history of the order down to the present day.

(1) The English Congregation.

The English were the first to put into practice the decrees of the LateranCouncil. Some time was necessarily spent in preliminary preparations, and thefirst general chapter was held at Oxford in 1218, from which time up to thedissolution under Henry VIII the triennial chapters appear to have been heldmore or less regularly. (Details of these chapters will be found in Reyner,Apostolatus Benedictinorum.) At first only the monasteries of the southernprovince of Canterbury were represented, but in 1338, in consequence of the BullBenedictina, the two provinces were united and the English congregationdefinitely established. This system of the union of houses and periodicalchapters interfered in the least possible degree with the Benedictine traditionof mutual independence of monasteries, though the Bull Benedictina wasintended to give some further development to it. In other countries attemptswere made from time to time to effect a greater degree of organization, but inEngland there was never any further advance along the path of centralization. Atthe time of the dissolution there were in England nearly three hundred houses ofblack monks, and though the numbers had from one cause or another somewhatdeclined, the English congregation may truthfully be said to have been in aflourishing condition at the time of the attempt to suppress it in the sixteenthcentury. The grave charges brought against the monks by Henry VIII's Visitors,though long believed in, are not now credited by serious historians. Thisreversal of opinion has been brought about mainly through the researches of suchwriters as Gasquet (Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, London, new ed.,1899; Eve of the Reformation, London, 1890), and Gairdner (Prefaces toCalendars of State Papers of Henry VIII).

Throughout the period of suppression the monks were the champions of the oldFaith, and when turned out of their homes very few conformed to the new religion.Some sought refuge abroad, others accepted pensions and lingered on in Englandhoping for a restoration of the former state of things, whilst not a fewpreferred to suffer lifelong imprisonment rather than surrender theirconvictions and claims. In Queen Mary's reign there was a brief revival atWestminster, where some of the surviving monks were brought together under Abbotf*ckenham in 1556. Of the monks professed there during the three years ofrevived existence, Dom Sigebert Buckley alone survived at the beginning of theseventeenth century; and he, after forty years of imprisonment, when nigh untodeath, in 1607, invested with the English habit and affiliated to WestminsterAbbey and to the English congregation two English priests, already Benedictinesof the Italian congregation. By this act he became the link between the old andthe new lines of English black monks, and through him the true succession wasperpetuated. About the same time a number of English monks were being trainedabroad, mostly in Spain, for the English mission, and these were in 1619aggregated by papal authority to the English congregation, though themonasteries founded by them had perforce to be situated abroad. St. Gregory's atDouai was established in 1605, St. Lawrence's at Dieulouard in Lorraine in 1606,and St. Edmund's at Paris in 1611. The first two of these communities remainedon the continent until driven to England by the French Revolution, but the thirdhas only recently returned. In 1633, by the Bull Plantata, Pope Urban VIIIbestowed upon the restored English congregation every privilege, grant,indulgence, faculty, and other prerogative which had ever belonged to theancient English congregation and also approved of its members taking on oath bywhich they bound themselves to labour for the reconversion of their country. Sozealous were they in this twenty-seven suffered martyrdom for the Faith, whilsteleven died in prison. Two other monasteries were added to the congregation,viz., Lamspring in Germany in 1643, and Saint-Malo in Brittany in 1611, thelatter, however, being passed over to the French (Maurist) congregation in 1672.

In 1795 the monks of Douai were expelled from their monastery by theRevolution, and after many hardships, including imprisonment, escaped to England,where, after a temporary residence at Acton Burnell (near Shrewsbury), theysettled in 1814 at Downside in Somerset. The monks of Dieulouard were alsodriven out at the same time and after some years of wandering establishedthemselves in 1802 at Ampleforth in Yorkshire. The monks of St. Edmund's, Paris,not successful in making their escape from France, were dispersed for a time,but when, in 1818, the buildings of St. Gregory's at Douai were recovered by thecongregation, the remnants of St. Edmund's community reassembled and resumedconventual life there in 1823. For eighty years they continued undisturbed,recruited by English subjects and carrying on their school for English boys,until, in 1903, the Association Laws of the French government once moreexpelled them from their monastery; returning to England, they have establishedthemselves at Woolhampton in Berkshire. The Abbey of Lamspring continued toflourish amongst Lutheran surroundings until it was suppressed by the PrussianGovernment in 1802 and the community dispersed. In 1828 a restoration ofconventual life in a small way was attempted at Broadway in Worcestershire,which lasted until 1841. The monks then went to other houses of the congregation,though the community was never formally disbanded. Continuity was preserved bythe last survivors of Broadway being incorporated in 1876 into the newly foundedcommunity of Fort Augustus in Scotland. In 1859 St. Michael's priory, at Belmont,near Hereford, was established, in compliance with a decree of Pius IX, as acentral novitiate and house of studies for the whole congregation. It was alsomade the pro-cathedral of the Diocese of Newport, the bishop and canons of whichare chosen from the English Benedictines, the cathedral-prior acting as provostof the chapter. Up to 1901 Belmont had no community of its own, but only membersfrom the other houses who were resident there either as professors or students;the general chapter of that year, however, decided that novices might henceforthbe received for St. Michael's monastery. In 1899 Leo XIII raised the threepriories of St. Gregory's (Downside), St. Lawrence's (Ampleforth), and St.Edmund's (Douai) to the rank of abbeys, so that the congregation now consists ofthree abbeys, and one cathedral-priory, each with its own community, but Belmontstill remains the central novitiate and tyrocinium for all the houses. Besidesits regular prelates, the English congregations, by virtue of the Bull Plantata(1633), allowed to perpetuate as titular dignities the nine cathedral-priorieswhich belonged to it before the Reformation, viz., Canterbury, Winchester,Durham, Coventry, Ely, Worcester, Rochester, Norwich, and Bath; to these havebeen added three more, Peterborough, Gloucester, and Chester, originallyBenedictine abbeys but raised to cathedral rank by Henry VIII. Six ancientabbacies also, St. Alban's, Westminster, Glastonbury, Evesham, Bury St. Edmunds,and St. Mary's, York, are similarly perpetuated by privilege granted in 1818.

(2) The Cassinese Congregation.

To prevent confusion it is necessary to pint out that there are twocongregations of this name. The first, with Monte Cassino as its chief house,was originally known as that of St. Justina of Padua, and with one exception hasalways been confined to Italy. The other is of much later institution and isdistinguished by the title of Primitive Observance. What follows relates tothe former of these two.

Most of the Italian monasteries had fallen under the influence of Cluny inthe tenth and eleventh centuries, and had adopted its customs, but by the end ofthe fourteenth century they had so greatly declined that there was then hardlyone left in which the Cluniac observance was retained. The Abbey of St. Justinaat Padua, which had formerly been Cluniac, was in a very corrupt and ruinousstate in 1407 when Gregory XII bestowed it in commendam on the Cardinal ofBologna. That prelate, desirous of reform, introduced some Olivetan monks, butthe three remaining Cluniac monks appealed to the Venetian Republic against thisencoachment on their rights, with the result that the abbey was restored to themand the Olivetans dismissed. The cardinal resigned the abbey to the pope, whothereupon gave it to Ludovico Barbo, a canon regular of St. George in alga. Hetook the Benedictine habit and received the abbatial blessing in 1409. With thehelp of two Camaldolese monks and two canons of Alga, he instituted a reformedobservance, which was quickly adopted in other monasteries as well. Permissionwas obtained from the pope for these to unite and form a new congregation, thefirst general chapters of which was held in 1421, when Abbot Barbo was electedthe first president. Amongst those that joined were the celebrated abbeys ofSubiaco, Monte Cassino, St. Paul's in Rome, St. George's at Venice, La Cava, andFarfa. In 1504 its title was changed to that of the Cassinese Congregation. Itgradually came to embrace all of the chief Benedictine houses of Italy, to thenumber of nearly two hundred, divided into seven provinces, Rome, Naples, Sicily,Tuscany, Venice, Lombardy, and Genoa. In 1505 the Abbey of Lérins in Provencetogether with all its dependent houses joined it. A highly centralized system ofgovernment was developed, modelled on the Italian republics, by which theautonomy of the individual houses was almost entirely destroyed. All power wasvested in a committee of definitors, in whose hands were all appointments,from that of president down to the lowest official in the smallest monastery.But in spite of this obvious departure from the Benedictine ideal and thedangers arising from such a system, the congregation continued in considerableprosperity until the wars of the Revolution period; and the later decrees of theItalian government put a check to its reception of novices and began a series ofsuppressions which have reduced its numbers enormously and shorn it of much ofits former greatness. The formation of the congregation of Primitive Observancefrom out of its midst has still further diminished the congregation, until itnow consists nominally of sixteen monasteries, some entirely without communities,and only three or four with sufficient numbers to keep up full conventualobservances.

(3) The Cassinese Congregation of Primitive Observance.

In the year 1851 Abbot Casaretto of Subiaco initiated at Genoa a return to astricter observance than was then in vogue, and several other monasteries of theCassinese congregation, including Subiaco itself, desiring to unite in thisreforming movement, Pius IX joined all such abbeys into one federation, whichwas called after its chief house, the Province of Subiaco. Before longmonasteries in other countries adopted the same reformed observance and becameaffiliated to Subiaco. In 1872 this union of monasteries was separatedaltogether from the original congregation and erected as a new and independentbody under the title of the Cassinese Congregation of Primitive Observance,which was divided into provinces according to the different countries in whichits houses were situated, with the Abbot of Subiaco as abbot-general of thewhole federation.

(a) The Italian Province dates from the original federation in 1851, andcomprises ten monasteries with over two hundred religious. One of these is theAbbey of Monte Vergine, formerly the mother-house of an independent congregation,but which was aggregated to this province in 1879.

(b) The English Province was formed in 1858 when certain English monks atSubiaco obtained permission to make a foundation in England. The Isle of Thanet,hallowed by the memory of St. Augustine's landing there twelve hundred and sixtyyears previously, was selected and a church which Augustus Welby Pugin had builtat Ramsgate was placed at their disposal. By 1860 a monastery had been erectedand full conventual life established. It became a priory in 1880 and in 1896 anabbey. In course of time, in addition to serving several neighbouring missions,the community embarked on work in New Zealand, where Dom Edmund Luck, a Ramsgatemonk, was made Bishop of Auckland. They also undertook work in Bengal in 1874,but this has since been relinquished to the secular clergy.

(c) The Belgian Province began in 1858 with the affiliation to Subiaco of theeleventh-century Abbey of Termonde. Afflighem followed in 1870, and since thentwo new foundations have been made in Belgium, and quite recently missionarywork has been undertaken in the Transvaal, South Africa.

(d) The French Province, perhaps the most numerous and flourishing in thecongregation, dates from 1859. Jean-Baptiste Muard, a parish priest and founderof a society of diocesan missioners, became a monk at Subiaco. After hisprofession there in 1849, he returned to France with two companions and settledat Pierre-qui-Vire, a lonely spot amid the forests of Avallon, where a mostaustere form of Benedictine life was established. After his death in 1854, theabbey he had founded was affiliated to the Cassinese P. O. congregation andbecame the mother-house of the French province. New foundations were made atBéthisy (1859), Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, the ancient Fleury (1865), Oklahoma,Indian Territory, U.S.A., with an Apostolic vicariate attached (1874), Belloc(1875), Kerbeneat (1888), Encalcat (1891), Nino-Dios, Argentina (1899), andJerusalem (1901). In 1880 the French Government annexed Pierre-qui-Vire andexpelled the community by force; some of them, however, were able to regainpossession a year or two later. The remainder sought refuge in England, where in1882 they acquired the site of the old Cistercian Abbey of Buckfast, inDevonshire. Here they are gradually rebuilding the abbey on its originalfoundations. The Association Laws of 1903 again dispersed the congregation,the monks of Pierre-qui-Vire finding a temporary home in Belgium, those ofBelloc and Encalcat going to Spain, and Kerbeneat to South Wales, whilst thoseof Béthisy and Saint-Benoit, being engaged in parochial work, obtainedauthorization and have remained in France.

(e) The Spanish Province dates from 1862, the year in which the ancient Abbeyof Montserrat, founded in the ninth century, was affiliated to the Cassinese P.O. congregation. The old Spanish congregation, which ceased to exist in 1835, isdealt with separately. Other old monasteries which had been restored, St. Clodioin 1880, Vilvaneira in 1883, and Samos in 1888, were, in 1893, joined withMontserrat to form the Spanish province. Since then new foundations have beenmade at Pueyo (1890), Los Cabos (1900), and Solsona (1901), besides one atManila (Philippines) in 1895. This province also includes the Abbey of NewNursia in Western Australia, founded in 1846 by two exiled monks from St.Martin's Abbey, Compostella, who after the general suppression in 1835 had founda home at La Cava in Italy. Seeing no hope of a return to Spain they hadvolunteered for foreign mission work and were sent to Australia in 1846. Theirnames were Joseph Serra and Rudesind Salvado. They settled amongst theaboriginal inhabitants at a place some seventy miles north of Perth, which theycalled New Nursia in honour of St. Benedict's birthplace, and there worked aspioneers of civilization and Christianity amongst the natives. Their labourswere crowned with success and their abbey gradually became the centre from whicha number of outlying mission stations were established. Dom Serra becamecoadjutor to the Bishop of Perth in 1848, and Dom Salvado was made Bishop ofPort Victoria in 1849, though he still remained superior of New Nursia, whichwas made an abbey in 1867 with a diocese attached. It had been aggregated to theItalian province of the congregation in 1864, but was transferred to the Spanishprovince on its formation in 1893. The monks own vast tracts of bushland aroundtheir monastery and they rear horses, sheep, and cattle on a large scale. Thecommunity includes a number of aboriginal converts amongst its lay brethren.

(4) The Bursfeld Union. Although more fully dealt with in a separate article,something must be said here about this congregation. Formed in 1430, it includedall the principal monasteries of Germany, and at the height of its prosperitynumbered one hundred and thirty-six houses of men and sixty-four of women. Itflourished until the Protestant Reformation, which with the religious wars thatfollowed entirely obliterated it, and most of its monasteries passed intoLutheran hands. In 1628 the few remaining representatives of the congregation,having recovered a right to some of their possessions, offered seven monasteriesto the newly resuscitated English congregation, on condition that the task ofgetting rid of the Lutheran occupants should devolve upon the English monks,whilst the monasteries should be restored to the Bursfeld congregation in theevent of its ever requiring them. No advantage was taken of this offer exceptwith regard to two houses-Rintelin, which was used as a seminary for a few yearsby the English Benedictines, and Lamspring, which continued as an abbey ofEnglish monks from 1644 to 1802. No other monasteries of the Bursfeld Union wereever restored to Benedictine use. (See BURSFELD.)

II. LAY BROTHERS, ORLATES, CONFRATERS, AND NUNS

(1) Lay Brothers.

Up to the eleventh century in Benedictine houses no distinction of rank wasmade between the clerical and the lay brethren. All were on an equal footing inthe community and at first comparatively few seem to have been advanced to thepriesthood. St. Benedict himself was probably only a layman; at any rate it iscertain that he was not a priest. A monk not in sacred orders was alwaysconsidered as eligible as a priest for any office in the community, even that ofabbot, though for purposes of convenience some of the monks were usuallyordained for the service of the altar; and until literary and scholastic work,which could only be undertaken by men of some education and culture, began totake the place of manual labour, all shared alike in the daily round ofa*gricultural and domestic duties. St. John Gualbert, the founder of Vallombrosa,was the first to introduce the system of lay brethren, by drawing a line ofdistinction between the monks who were clerics and those who were not. Thelatter had no stalls in choir and no vote in chapter; neither were they bound tothe daily recitation of the breviary Office as were the choir monks. Laybrothers were entrusted with the more menial work of the monastery, and allthose duties that involved intercourse with the outside world, in order that thechoir brethren might be free to devote themselves entirely to prayer and otheroccupations proper to their clerical vocation. The system spread rapidly to allbranches of the order and was imitated by almost every other religious order. Atthe present day there is hardly a congregation, Benedictine or otherwise, thathas not its lay brethren, and even amongst numerous orders of nuns a similardistinction is observed, either between the nuns that are bound to choir andthose that are not, or between those that keep strict enclosure and those thatare not so enclosed. The habit worn by the lay brethren is usually amodification of that of the choir monks, sometimes differing from it in colouras well as in shape; and the vows of the lay brethren are in most congregationsonly simple, or renewable periodically, in contrast with the solemn vows forlife taken by the choir religious. In some communities at the present time thelay brothers equal and even outnumber the priests, especially in those, likeBeuron or New Nursia, where farming and agriculture are carried out on a largescale.

(2) Oblates.

This term was formerly applied to children offered by their parents in asolemn way to a monastery, a dedication by which they were considered to haveembraced the monastic state. The custom led to many abuses in the Middle Ages,because oblates sometimes abandoned the religious life and returned to the world,whilst still looked upon as professed religious. The Church, therefore, in thetwelfth century, forbade the dedication of children in this way, and the termoblate has since been taken to mean persons, either lay or cleric, whovoluntarily attach themselves to some monastery or order without taking the vowsof religious. They wear the habit and share all the privileges and exercises ofthe community they join, but they retain dominion over their property and arefree to leave at any time. They usually make a promise of obedience to thesuperior, which binds them as long as they remain in the monastery, but it onlypartakes of the nature of a mutual agreement and has none of the properties of avow or solemn contract.

(3) Confratres.

A custom sprang up in the Middle Ages of uniting lay people to a religiouscommunity by formal aggregation, through which they participated in all theprayers and good works of the monks, and though living in the world, they couldalways feel that they were connected in a special way with some religious houseor order. There seem to have been Benedictine confratres as early as the ninthcentury. The practice was widely taken up by almost every other order and wasdeveloped by the mendicants in the thirteenth century into what are now calledthird orders. It was peculiar to Benedictine confratres that they were alwaysaggregated to the particular monastery of their selection and not to the wholeorder in general, as is the case with others. The Benedictines have numberedkings and emperors and many distinguished persons amongst their confratres, andthere is hardly a monastery of the present day which has not some lay peopleconnected with it by this spiritual bond of union.

(4) Nuns.

Nothing very definite can be said as to the first nuns living under the Ruleof St. Benedict. St. Gregory the Great certainly tells us that St. Benedict'ssister, Scholastica, presided over such a community of religious women who wereestablished in a monastery situated about five miles from his Abbey of MonteCassino; but whether that was merely an isolated instance, or whether it may belegitimately regarded as the foundation of the female department of the order,is at least an open question. We do not even know what rule these nuns followed,though we may conjecture that they were under St. Benedict's spiritual directionand that whatever rule he gave them probably differed but little, except perhapsin minor details, from that for monks which has come down to us bearing his name.It seems tolerably certain, at any rate, that as St. Benedict's Rule began to bediffused abroad, women as well as men formed themselves into communities inorder to live a religious life according to its principles, and wherever theBenedictine monks went, there also we find monasteries being established fornuns. Nunneries were founded in Gaul by Sts. Caesarius and Aurelian of Arles, St.Martin of Tours, and St. Columbanus of Luxeuil, and up to the sixth century therules for nuns in most general use were those of St. Caesarius and St.Columbanus, portions of which are still extant. These were, however, eventuallysupplanted by that of St. Benedict, and amongst the earliest nunneries to makethe change were Poitiers, Chelles, Remiremont, and Faremoutier. Mabillon assignsthe beginning of the change to the year 620 though more probably the BenedictineRule was not received in its entirety at so early a date, but was only combinedwith the other rules then in force. Remiremont became for women what Luxeuil wasfor men, the centre from which sprang a numerous spiritual family, and thoughlater on it was converted into a convent of noble cannonesses, instead of nunsproperly so called, a modified form of the Benedictine Rule was still observedthere. St. Benedict's Rule was widely propagated by Charlemagne and his son,Louis the Pious, and the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 817 enforced its generalobservance in all the nunneries of the empire. The Abbey of Notre Dame deRonceray, at Angers, founded in 1028 by Fulke, Count of Anjou, was one of themost influential convents in France in the Middle Ages, and had under itsjurisdiction a large number of dependent priories.

The earliest convents for women in England were at Folkestone, founded 630,and St. Mildred's in Thanet, established 670, and it is probable that under theinfluence of the successors of St. Augustine's monks at Canterbury and elsewhere,these nunneries observed the Benedictine Rule from the first. Other importantAnglo-Saxon convents were: Ely, founded by St. Etheldreda in 673, Barking (675),Wimborne (713), Wilton (800), Ramsey, Hants (967), and Amesbury (980). InNorthumbria, Whitby (657) and Coldingham (673) were the chief houses of nuns. St.Hilda was the most celebrated of the abbesses of Whitby, and it was at Whitbythat the synod which decided the paschal controversy was held in 664. Most ofthese convents were destroyed by Danish invaders during the ninth and tenthcenturies, but some were subsequently restored and many others were founded inEngland after the Norman conquest.

The first nuns in Germany came from England in the eighth century, havingbeen brought over by St. Boniface to assist him in his work of conversion and toprovide a means of education for their own sex amongst the newly evangelizedTeutonic races. Sts. Lioba, Thecla, and Walburga were the earliest of thesepioneers, and for them and their companions, who were chiefly from Wimborne, St.Boniface established many convents throughout the countries in which he preached.In other parts of Europe nunneries sprang up as rapidly as the abbeys for men,and in the Middle Ages they were almost, if not quite, as numerous. In latermedieval times the names of St. Gertrude, called the Great, and her sister St.Mechtilde, who flourished in the thirteenth century, shed a lustre on theBenedictine nuns of Germany. In Italy the convents seem to have been verynumerous during the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century several were foundedin which the reform of Vallombrosa was adopted, but none of these now exist.There were also convents belonging to the reforms of Camaldoli and Mount Olivet,of which a few still survive.

Except in the Bursfeld Union, which included houses of both sexes, and in theCistercian reform, where the nuns were always under the Abbot of Cîteaux, and afew others of minor importance, the congregational system was never applied tothe houses of women in an organized way. The convents were generally eitherunder the exclusive direction of some particular abbey, through the influence ofwhich they had been established, or else, especially when founded by lay people,they were subject to the jurisdiction of the bishop of the diocese in which theywere situated. These two conditions of existence have survived to the presentday; there are nine belonging to the first and over two hundred and fifty to thesecond category.

Early in the twelfth century France was the scene of a somewhat remarkablephase in the history of the Benedictine nuns. Robert of Arbrissel, formerlychancellor to the Duke of Brittany, embraced an eremitical life in which he hadmany disciples, and having founded a monastery of canons regular, carried out anew idea in 1099 when he established the double Abbey of Fontevrault in Poitou,famous in France for many centuries. The monks and nuns both kept theBenedictine Rule, to which were added some additional austerities. The law ofenclosure was very strictly observed. In 1115 the founder placed the entirecommunity, monks as well as nuns, under the rule of the abbess, and he furtherprovided that the person elected to that office should always be chosen from theoutside world, as such a one would have more practical knowledge of affairs andcapacity for administration than one trained in the cloister. Many noble ladiesand royal princesses of France are reckoned amongst the abbesses of Fontevrault.(See FONTEVRAULT.)

Excepting at Fontevrault the nuns seem at first not to have been strictlyenclosed, as now, but were free to leave the cloister whenever some special dutyor occasion might demand it, as in the case of the English nuns alreadymentioned, who went to Germany for active missionary work. This freedom withregard to enclosure gave rise, in course of time, to grave scandals, and theCouncils of Constance (1414), Basle (1431), and Trent (1545), amongst others,regulated that all the professedly contemplative orders of nuns should observestrict enclosure, and this has continued to the present time as the normal ruleof a Benedictine convent.

The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century affected the nuns as wellas the monks. Throughout north-western Europe the Benedictine institute waspractically obliterated. In England the convents were suppressed and the nunsturned adrift. In Germany, Denmark, and Scandinavia the Lutherans acquired mostof the nunneries and ejected their inmates. The wars of religion in France alsohad a disastrous effect upon the convents of that country, already muchenfeebled by the evils consequent on the practice of commendam. The last fewcenturies, however, have witnessed a widespread revival of the Benedictine lifefor women as well as for men. In France, especially, during the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, there sprang up several new congregations of Benedictinenuns, or reforms were instituted among those already existing. These were notstrictly congregations in the technical sense, but rather unions or groups ofhouses which adopted a uniform observance, though the individual convents stillremained for the most part subject to their respective bishops. Mention may bemade of the reforms of Montmartre, Beauvais, Val-de-Grace, and Douai, and thoseof the Perpetual Adoration founded at Paris in 1654 and Valdosne in 1701. TheFrench Revolution suppressed all these convents, but many have since beenrestored and fresh foundations added to their number.

The first convent of English nuns since the Reformation was founded atBrussels in 1598; and another was established at Cambrai in 1623 under thedirection of the English Benedictine Fathers of Douai, from which a filiationwas made at Paris in 1652. At Ghent in 1624 a convent was founded under Jesuitguidance, and established daughter-houses at Boulogne in 1652, Ypres in 1665,and Dunkirk in 1662. All these communities, except that of Ypres, were expelledat the French Revolution and escaped to England. That of Cambrai is now atStanbrook and still remains a member of the English congregation under thejurisdiction of its abbot-president. The Brussels community is now at EastBergholt, and the Paris nuns at Colwich, whence an off-shoot has been planted atAtherstone (1842). Those of Ghent are now at Oulton; Boulogne and Dunkirk,having combined, are settled at Teignmouth. The convent of Ypres alone remainsat the place of its original foundation, having survived the troublous times ofthe Revolution. There are also small Benedictine convents of more recentfoundation at Minster (Thanet), Ventnor, Dumfries, and Tenby, and one atPrincethorpe, originally a French community founded at Montargis in 1630, butdriven to England in 1792, and now almost exclusively English. The nuns ofStanbrook, Oulton, Princethorpe, Ventnor, and Dumfries conduct boarding-schoolfor the higher education of young ladies, and those of Teignmouth, Colwich,Atherstone, and Dumfries have undertaken the work of perpetual adoration.

In Austria many of the medieval convents have remained undisturbed, andlikewise a few in Switzerland. In Belgium there are seven dating from theseventeenth century, and in Germany fourteen, established mostly during the lasthalf century. In Italy, where at one time they were very numerous, there stillremain, in spite of recent suppressions, eighty-five Benedictine convents datingfrom the Middle Ages, with over a thousand nuns. Holland has three convents ofmodern date, and Poland one, at Warsaw, founded in 1687. The convents of Spainnumbered thirty at the time of the suppressions of 1835. The nuns were thenrobbed of all their possessions, but managed to preserve their corporateexistence, though in great poverty and with reduced numbers. Ten of the oldconvents have since been restored, and eleven new ones founded. It is apeculiarity of the Spanish convents that their abbesses who are electedtriennially, receive no solemn blessing, as elsewhere, nor do they make use ofany abbatial insignia.

Benedictine life in America may be said to be in a flourishing condition.There are thirty-four convents with nearly two thousand nuns, all of which havebeen founded within the last sixty years. The first establishment was at St.Mary's, Pennsylvania, where Abbot Wimmer settled some German nuns from Eichstättin 1852; this is still one of the most important convents in the United States,and from it many filiations have been made. St. Benedict's convent at St. Joseph,Minnesota, founded in 1857, is the largest Benedictine convent in America. Otherimportant houses are at Allegheny (Pennsylvania), Atchison (Kansas), Chicago (2),Covington (Kentucky), Duluth (Minnesota), Erie (Pennsylvania), Ferdinand(Indiana), Mount Angel (Oregon), Newark (New Jersey), New Orleans (Louisiana),Shoal Creek (Arkansas), and Yankton (South Dakota). The nuns are chieflyoccupied with the work of education, which comprises elementary schools as wellas boarding school for secondary education. All the American convents aresubject to the bishops of their respective dioceses.

III. INFLUENCE AND WORK OF THE ORDER

The influence exercised by the Order of St. Benedict has manifested itselfchiefly in three directions: (1) the conversion of the Teutonic races and othermissionary works; (2) the civilization of north-western Europe; (3) educationalwork and the cultivation of literature and the arts, the forming of libraries,etc.

(1) Missionary Work of the Order.

At the time of St. Benedict's death (c. 543) the only countries of WesternEurope which had been Christianized were Italy, Spain, Gaul, and part of theBritish Isles. The remaining countries all received the Gospel during the nextfew centuries, either wholly or partially through the preaching of theBenedictines. Beginning with St. Augustine's arrival in England in 597, themissionary work of the order can be easily traced. The companions of St.Augustine, who is usually called the Apostle of England, planted the Faithanew throughout the country whence it had been driven out nearly two centuriespreviously by the Anglo-Saxon and other heathen invaders. St. Augustine and St.Lawrence at Canterbury, St. Justus at Rochester, St. Mellitus at London, and St.Paulinus at York were Benedictine pioneers, and their labours were afterwardssupplemented by other monks who, though not strictly Benedictine, were at leastassisted by the black monks in establishing the Faith. Thus St. Birinusevangelized Wessex, St. Chad the Midlands, and St. Felix East Anglia, whilst theCeltic monks from Iona settled at Lindisfarne, whence the work of St. Paulinusin Northumbria was continued by St. Aidan, St. Cuthbert, and many others. In 716England sent forth Winfrid, afterwards called Boniface, a Benedictine monktrained at Exeter, who preached the Faith in Friesland, Alemannia, Thuringia,and Bavaria, and finally, being made Archbishop of Mentz (Mainz), became theApostle of central Germany. At Fulda he placed a Bavarian convert named Sturm atthe head of a monastery he founded there in 744, from which came manymissionaries who carried the Gospel to Prussia and what is now Austria. FromCorbie, in Picardy, one of the most famous monasteries in France, St. Ansgar setout in 827 for Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, in each of which countries hefounded many monasteries and firmly planted the Benedictine Rule. These in turnspread the Faith and monasticism through Iceland and Greenland. For a short timeFriesland was the scene of the labours of St. Wilfrid during a temporarybanishment from England in 678, and the work he began there was continued andextended to Holland by the English monks Willibrord and Swithbert. Christianitywas first preached in Bavaria by Eustace and Agilus, monks from Luseuil, earlyin the seventh century; their work was continued by St. Rupert, who founded themonastery and see of Salzburg, and firmly established by St. Boniface about 739.So rapidly did the Faith spread in this country that between the years 740 and780 no less than twenty-nine Benedictine abbeys were founded there.

IV. PRESENT CONDITION OF THE ORDER

Development of external organization

A brief sketch of the constitution and government of the order is necessaryfor a proper understanding of its present organization.

According to St. Benedict's idea, each monastery constituted a separate,independent, autonomous family, the members of which elected their own superior.The abbots, therefore, of the different houses were equal in rank, but each wasthe actual head of his own community and held his office for life. Thenecessities of the times, however, the need for mutual support, theestablishment of daughter-houses, and possibly the ambition of individualsuperiors, all combined in course of time to bring about a modification of thisideal. Although foreshadowed by the Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) capitula of 817under St. Benedict of Aniane, the actual results of which died out with theiroriginator, the first real departure from the Benedictine ideal, subjecting thesuperiors of different houses to one central authority, was made by Cluny in thetenth century. The plan of the Cluniac congregation was that of one grandcentral monastery with a number of dependencies spread over many lands. It wasfeudalism applied to the monastic institute. Every prior or subordinate superiorwas the nominee of the Abbot of Cluny and held office only during his pleasure;the autonomy of the individual communities was destroyed so far, even, that nomonk could be professed in any house except by permission of the Abbot of Cluny,and all were obliged usually to spend some years at Cluny itself. Butnotwithstanding the extent of this departure from Benedictine tradition, theCluniacs were never considered to have seceded from the main Benedictine body orto have instituted a new order. Hirschau, in Germany, copied Cluny, though withless conspicuous success, and Cîteaux developed the system still further andconstituted a new order outside the Benedictine fold, which has ever since beenregarded as such. The example of Cluny produced imitators and many new unions ofmonasteries subject to a central abbey resulted. The Lateran Council of 1215,perceiving the good points of the system as well as its dangers, set itself tostrike the mean between the two. The risks of an ever-widening breach betweenthose which adhered to Benedictine tradition and those which had adopted theCluniac ideas, were to be minimized, whilst at the same time uniformity ofobservance and the mutual strength resulting therefrom, were to be fostered. Thecouncil decreed that the monasteries of each country should be banded togetherinto a congregation; periodical representative chapters were to ensuresystematic government after one pattern; the appointment of definitors andvisitors was to secure uniformity and cohesion; and the autonomy of theindividual monasteries were to be preserved. The plan promised well, but Englandalone seems to have given it a fair trial. In some of the countries it was notuntil the issue of the Bull Benedictina in 1336, or even the Tridentinedecrees of two centuries later, that any serious attempt was made towardscarrying out the proposals of 1215. Meanwhile certain Italian reforms hadproduced a number of independent congregations outside the order, differing fromeach other in organization and spirit, and in each of which the departure fromBenedictine principles was carried a stage further. Even in the Cluniaccongregation the power of the Abbot of Cluny was, after the twelfth century,somewhat curtailed by the institution of chapters and definitors. TheSylvestrines (1231) preserved the perpetuity of superiors and recognized theadvantages of a representative chapter, though its chief superior was somethingmore than a mere primus inter pares. The Celestines (1274) adopted a somewhatsimilar system of centralized authority, but differed from it in that theirsuperior was elected triennially. The Olivetans (1319) marked the furthest pointof development by instituting an abbot-general with jurisdiction over all theother abbots as well as their communities. The general chapter nominated theofficials of all the houses; the monks belonged to no one monastery inparticular, but to the whole congregation; and by thus destroying all communityrights, and placing all power in the hands of a small committee, the Olivetancongregation approximated nearest to the alter orders like the Dominicans andJesuits, with their highly centralized systems of government. The congregationof St. Justina of Padua was modelled on similar lines, though afterwardsconsiderably modified, and some centuries later St.-Vannes and St.-Maur followedin its wake. The Spanish congregation of Valladolid, too, with its abbot-general,and with superiors who were not perpetual and chosen by the general chapters,must be classed with those that represent the line of departure from earlierBenedictine tradition; as must also the resuscitated English congregation of theseventeenth century, which inherited its constitution from that of Spain. Inthese two latter congregations, however, there were some modifications, whichmade their dissent from the original ideal less marked than in those previouslyenumerated. On the other side, as representing those that preserved thetraditional autonomy and family spirit in the individual houses, we have theBursfeld Union which, in the fifteenth century, made an honest attempt to carryout the Lateran decrees and the provisions of the Bull Benedictina. TheAustrian, Bavarian, and Swiss congregations of the same period followed out thesame idea, as do also almost all of the more modern congregations, and by thelegislation of Leo XIII the traditional principles of government have beenrevived in the English congregation. In this way the true Benedictine ideal wasrestored, whilst by means of general chapters, at which every monastery of thecongregation was represented, and by the periodical visitations made by thepresidents or others elected for that duty, uniform observance and regulardiscipline were preserved. The presidents were elected by the other abbotscomposing the chapter and their office was merely presidential not that of asuperior general or abbas abbatum.

Present System of Government

All the congregations of more recent formation have been constituted, withslight variations, on the same plan, which represents the normal and traditionalform of government in the order. Uniformity in the various congregations isfurther secured by what are called Constitutions. These are a series ofdeclarations on the holy Rule, defining its interpretation and application, towhich are added other regulations on points of discipline and practice notprovided for by St. Benedict. The constitutions must be approved at Rome, afterwhich they have binding force upon the congregation for which they are intended.The capitula of Aachen and the Concordia Regularis were the earliest examples ofsuch constitutions. Amongst others may be mentioned the Statues of Lanfranc,the Discipline of Farfa, the Ordo of Bernard of Cluny, and theConstitutions of St. William of Hirschau. (The three latter are printed byHerrgott in Vetus Disciplina Monastica, Paris, 1726.) Since the thirteenthcentury every congregation has had its own set of constitutions, in which theprinciples of the Rule are adapted to the particular work of the congregation towhich they apply. Each congregation is composed of a certain number ofmonasteries, the abbots of which, with other officials and electedrepresentatives, form the general chapter, which exercises legislative andexecutive authority over the whole body. The power possessed by it is strictlylimited and defined in the constitutions. The meetings of the chapter are heldusually every two, three, or four years and are presided over by one of themembers elected to that office by the rest. Whilst the office of abbot isusually for life, that of the president is generally only for a term of yearsand the person holding it is not in all cases eligible for continuousre-election. Each president, either by himself or in conjunction with one ormore specially elected visitors, holds canonical visitations of all the housesof his congregation, and by this means the chapter is kept informed of thespiritual and temporal condition of each monastery, and discipline is maintainedaccording to the constitutions.

The Abbot Primate

In order the better to bind together the various congregations thatconstitute the order at the present day, Pope Leo XIII, in 1893, appointed anominal head over the whole federation, with the title of Abbot Primate. Thetraditional autonomy of each congregation, and still further of each house, isinterfered with in the least possible degree by this appointment, for, as thetitle itself indicates, the office is in its nature different from that of thegeneral of an order. Apart from matters explicitly defined, the abbot primate'sposition with regard to the other abbots is to be understood rather from theanalogy of a primate in a hierarchy than from that of the general of an orderlike the Dominicans or Jesuits.

Methods of Recruiting

The recruiting of the various monasteries of the order differs according tothe nature and scope of the influence exerted by each individual house. Thosethat have schools attached to them naturally draw their members more or lessfrom these schools. The English congregation is recruited very largely from theschools attached to its monasteries; and other congregations are similarlyrecruited. Some educate and train in their monasteries a number of alumni, orpupils provisionally intended for the monastic state, who though not in any waybound to do so, if showing any signs of vocation, are encouraged to receive thehabit on reaching the canonical age.

A candidate for admission is usually kept as a postulant for at least someweeks in order that the community he seeks to join may judge whether he is asuitable person to be admitted to the probationary stage. Having been acceptedas such, he is clothed as a novice, receiving the religious habit and areligious name, and being placed under the care of the novice-master. Accordingto the Rule he has to be trained and tested during his period of noviceship, andcanon law requires that for the most part the novice is to be kept apart formthe rest of the community. For this reason the novices' quarters are generallyplaced, if possible, in a different part of the monastery from those occupied bythe professed monks. The canonical novitiate lasts one year, at the end of which,if satisfactory, the novice may be admitted to simple vows, and at theconclusion of another three years, unless rejected for grave reasons, he makeshis solemn vows of Stability, Conversion of manners, and Obedience. (Rule ofSt. Benedict.)

Habit

With slight modifications in shape in some congregations the habit of theorder consists of a tunic, confined at the waist by a girdle of leather or ofcloth, a scapular, the width of the shoulders and reaching to the knees orground, and a hood to cover the head. In choir, at chapter, and at certain otherceremonial times, a long full gown with large flowing sleeves, called a cowl,is worn over the ordinary habit. The colour is not specified in the Rule but itis conjectured that the earliest Benedictines wore white or grey, as being thenatural colour of undyed wool. For many centuries, however, black has been theprevailing colour, hence the term black monk has come to signify a Benedictinenot belonging to one of those separate congregations which has adopted adistinctive colour, e. g. the Camaldolese, Cistercians, and Olivetans, who wearwhite, or the Sylvestrines, whose habit is blue. The only differences in colourwithin the Benedictine federation are those of the monks of Monte Vergine, whothough now belonging to the Cassinese congregation of Primitive Observance,still retain the white habit adopted by their founder in the twelfth century,and those of the congregation of St. Ottilien, who wear a red girdle to signifytheir special missionary character.

Present Work of the Order

Parochial work is undertaken by the following congregations: Cassinese,English, Swiss, Bavarian, Gallican, American-Cassinese, Swiss-American,Beuronese, Cassinese P.O., Austrian (both), Hungarian, and the Abbey of FortAugustus. In the majority of these congregations the mission are attached tocertain abbeys and the monks serving them are under the almost exclusive controlof their own monastic superiors; in others the monks only supply the place ofthe secular clergy and are, therefore, for the time being, under theirrespective diocesan bishops.

The work of education is common to all congregations of the order. It takesthe form in different places of seminaries for ecclesiastical studies, schools,and gymnasia for secondary education not strictly ecclesiastical, or of collegesfor a higher or university course. In Austria and Bavaria many of the governmentlycées or gymnasia are entrusted to the care of the monks. In England andAmerica the Benedictine schools rank high amongst the educational establishmentsof those countries, and compete successfully with the non-Catholic schools of asimilar class. Those of the American Cassinese congregation have already beenenumerated; they include three seminaries, fourteen schools and colleges, and anorphanage, with a total of nearly two thousand students. The Swiss Americancongregation carries on scholastic work at five of its abbeys. At. St. Meinrad's,besides the seminary, there is a commercial college; at Spielerville (Arkansas)and Mount Angels (Oregon) are seminaries; and at Conception, Spielerville,Covington (Louisiana), and Mount Angel are colleges. The English Benedictineshave large and flourishing colleges attached to each of their abbeys, andbelonging to Downside are also two other smaller schools, one a grammar schoolat Ealing, London, and the other a preparatory school recently established atEnniscorthy, Ireland.

Foreign Missionary Work

Besides the congregation of St. Ottilien, which exists specially for thepurpose of foreign missionary work, and has ten mission stations in theApostolic Vicariate of Zanzibar, a few others are also represented in theforeign mission field. Both American congregations labour amongst the Indians,in Saskatchewan (N.W.T., Canada), Dakota, Vancouver's Island, and elsewhere. TheCassinese P.O. congregation has missions in the Apostolic Vicariate of theIndian Territory (U.S.A.) and in Argentina, under the monks of the Frenchprovince, in New Zealand under the English province, in Western Australia(Diocese of New Nursia and Apostolic Vicariate of Kimberley) and in thePhilippines under the Spanish province, and the Belgian province has quitelately made a foundation in the Transvaal, South Africa. The Braziliancongregation has several missions in Brazil, which are under the direction ofthe Abbot of Rio de Janeiro, who is also a bishop. In the island of Mauritiusthe Bishop of Port Louis is generally an English Benedictine. Mention hasalready been made of the work of the Sylvestrine Benedictines in Ceylon and ofthe Cistercians in Natal, South Africa.

**Statistics of the Order**
Congregation	Monasteries	Monks	Missions and Churches Served	No. of Souls Administered to	Schools	Students
Cassinese	16	188	274	170,540	6	476
English	4	277	79	87,328	5	380
Swiss	5	355	42	34,319	7	978
Bavarian	11	383	51	78,422	10	1,719
Brazilian	13	110	6		4	770
Gallican	11	374	1	550	2	42
American Cassinese	10	753	151	110,320	18	1,702
Beuronese	9	711	14	3,812	5	141
Swiss American	7	348	103	35,605	10	675
Cassinese P.O.	36	1,092	90	115,410	17	859
Austrian:
Imm. Conc.	11	647	367	460,832	11	1,891
St. Joseph	7	293	61	55,062	10	901
Hungarian	11	198	145	37,269	6	1,668
St. Ottilien	2	163	10	2,835	3	190
Fort Augustus	1	47	8	430
St. Anselm's	1	1
	155	5,940	1,402	1,192,734	114	12,392

Orders and congregations professing the Rule of St. Benedict but not includedin the Benedictine Federation are as follows:

Congregation	Monasteries	No. of Religious
Camaldolese	19	241
Vallombrosa	3	60
Cistercians (Common Observance)	29	1,040
Cistercians (Trappists)	58	3,637
Sylvestrines	9	95
Olivetans	10	122
Mechitarists	14	152
	142	5,347

Nuns, Benedictine and others:

Benedictine Nuns:	Convents	No. of Religious
1. Under Benedictine Abbots	9	251
2. Under Bishops	253	7,156
Nuns	5	150
Cistercian Nuns	100	2,965
Olivetan Nuns	20	200
	387	10,722

The foregoing tables, which are taken from the Album Benedictinum of 1906,give a grand aggregate of 684 monasteries, with 22,009 religious of both sexes.The statistics for missions and churches served include those churches andmissions over which the monasteries exercise the right of patronage, as well asthose actually served by monks.

V. BENEDICTINES OF SPECIAL DISTINCTION

The following lists are not intended to be in any way exhaustive; they merelyprofess to include some of the more famous members of the order. The names areclassified according to the particular sphere of work in which they are mostcelebrated, but although many of them might therefore have a just claim to beincluded in more than one of the different classes, when the same individual wasdistinguished in several different departments of work, from considerations ofspace and for the avoidance of unnecessary repetition, his name has beeninserted only under one head. The lists are arranged more or lesschronologically, except where some connecting features seem to call for specialgrouping. To most of the names the country to which the individual belonged isadded in parenthesis.

PopesSt. Gregory the Great (Rome); born c. 540, d. 604; one of the four Latin doctors;celebrated for his writings and for his reform of ecclesiastical change; calledthe Apostle of England because he sent St. Augustine to that country in 596.
Sylvester II or Gerbert (France), 999-1003; a monk of Fleury.
St. Gregory VII or Hildebrand Aldobrandeschi (Tuscany), 1073-85; a monk ofCluny and afterwards Abbot of St. Paul's, Rome.
Bl. Victor III (Benevento), 1087-87; Abbot of Monte Cassino.
Paschal II (Tuscany), 1099-1118; a monk of Cluny.
Gelasius II or Giovanni da Gaeta, John Cajetan (Gaeta), 1118-19; historian.
St. Celestine V or Pietro di Murrhone (Apulia), b. 1221, d. 1296; founderof the order of Celestines; was elected pope 1294, but abdicated after reigningonly six months.
Clement VI (France), 1342-52; a monk of Chaise-Dieu.
Bl. Urban V (France), 1362-70; Abbot of St. Victor, Marseilles.
Pius VII or Barnaba Chiaramonti (Italy), 1800-23; was taken by force fromRome and imprisoned at Savona and Fontainebleu (1809-14) by Napoleon, whom hehad crowned in 1804; returned to Rome in 1814.
Gregory XVI or Maurus Cappellari (Venice), 1831-46, a monk and Abbot of St.Andrew's on the Coelian Hill, Rome.

Apostles and Missionaries

St. Augustine (Rome), d. 604; Prior of St. Andrew's on the Coelian Hill; theApostle of England (596); first Archbishop of Canterbury (597).
St. Boniface (England), b. 680, martyred 755; Apostle of Germany andArchbishop of Mainz.
St. Willibrord (England), born c. 658, d. 738; the Apostle of Friesland.
St. Swithbert (England), d. 713; the Apostle of Holland.
St. Rupert (France), d. 718; the Apostle of Bavaria and Bishop of Salzburg.
St. Sturm (Bavaria), d. 779; first Abbot of Fulda.
St. Ansgar (Germany), b. 801, d. 865; monk of Corbie and Apostle ofScandinavia.
St. Adalbert, d. 997; the Apostle of Bohemia.

Founders of Abbeys and Congregations, Reformers, etc.

St. Erkenwald (England), died c. 693; Bishop of London; founder of Chertseyand Barking abbeys.
St. Benedict Biscop (England), d. 690; founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow.
St. Filbert (France), d. 684; founder of Jumieges.
St. Benedict of Aniane (France), d. 821; reformer of monasteries underCharlemagne; presided at council of abbots, Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), 817.
St. Dunstan (England), d. 988; Abbot of Glastonbury (c. 945), andafterwards Archbishop of Canterbury (961); reformer of English monasteries.
St. Berno (France), d. 927; founder and first Abbot of Cluny (909).
St. Odo or Eudes (France), b. 879, d. 942; second Abbot of Cluny.
St. Aymard (France), d. 965; third Abbot of Cluny.
St. Majolus or Maieul (France), b. 906, d. 994; fourth Abbot of Cluny;Otto II desired to make him pope in 974 but he refused.
St. Odilo (France), d. 1048; fifth Abbot of Cluny.
Bernard of Cluny (France), d. 1109; famous in connexion with theeleventh-century Ordo Cluniacensis which bears his name.
Peter the Venerable (France), d. 1156; ninth Abbot of Cluny; employed byseveral popes in important affairs of the Church.
St. Romuald (Italy), b. 956, d. 1026; founder of the congregation (1009).
Herluin (France), d. 1078; founder of Bec (1040).
St. Robert of Molesmes (France), b. 1018, d. 1110; founder and Abbot ofMolesmes (1075); joint-founder and first Abbot of Cîteaux (1098).
St. Alberic (France), d. 1109; joint-founder and second Abbot of Cîteaux.
St. Stephen Harding (England), d. 1134; joint-founder and third Abbot ofCîteaux.
St. Bernard (France), b. 1091, d. 1153; joined Cîteaux with thirty othernoblemen (1113); founded Clairvaux (1115); wrote many spiritual and theologicalworks; was a statesman and adviser of kings, and a Doctor of the Church; hepreached the Second Crusade throughout France and Germany at the request ofEugenius III (1146).
St. William of Hirschau (Germany), c. 1090; author of Constitutions ofHirschau.
St. John Gualbert (Italy), b. 999, d. 1073; founder of Vallombrosa (1039).
St. Stephen or Etienne (France), d. 1124; founder of Grammont (1076).
Bl. Robert of Arbrissel (France), d. 1116; founder of Fontevrault (1099).
St. William (Italy), d. 1142; founder of Monte Vergine (1119).
St. Sylvester (Italy), b. 1177, d. 1267; founder of the Sylvestrines (1231).
St. Bernard Ptolemy (Italy), b. 1272, d. 1348; founder of the Olivetans(1319).
Ludovico Barbo (Italy), d. 1443; first a canon regular, then Abbot of St.Justina of Padua and founder of the congregation of the same name (1409).
Didier de la Cour (France), b. 1550, d. 1623; founder of the congregationof St.-Vannes (1598).
Laurent Bénard (France), b. 1573, d. 1620; Prior of Cluny College, Paris,and founder of the Maurist congregation (1618).
José Serra (Spain), b. 1811, died c. 1880; Coadjutor bishop of Perth,Australia (1848); and Rudesind Salvado (Spain), b. 1814, d. 1900; Bishop of PortVictoria (1849); founders of New Nursia, Australia.
Prosper Guéranger (France), b. 1805, d. 1875; founder of the Gallicancongregation (1837); restored Solesmes (1837); well known as a liturgical writer.
Jean-Baptiste Muard (France), b. 1809, d. 1854; founder of Pierre-qui-Vireand of the French province of the Cassinese Congregation of the PrimitiveObservance (1850).
Maurus Wolter (Germany), b. 1825, d. 1900; founder of the Beuronesecongregation (1860); Abbot of Beuron (1868).
Pietro Francesco Casaretto (Italy), b. 1810, d. 1878; founder and firstAbbot-General of Cassinese congregation of Primitive Observance (1851).
Boniface Wimmer (Bavaria), b. 1809, d. 1887; founder of American Cassinesecongregation (1855).
Martin Marty (Switzerland), b. 1834, d. 1896; founder of Swiss Americancongregation (1870); Abbot of St. Meinrad's, Indiana (1870); Vicar Apostolic ofDakota (1879).
Jerome Vaughan (England), b. 1841, d. 1896; founder of Fort Augustus Abbey(1878).
Gerard van Caloen (Belgium), b. 1853; restorer of Brazilian congregation;Abbot of Bahia (1896); titular Bishop of Phocaea (1906).

Scholars, Historians, Spiritual Writers, etc.

St. Bede (England), b. 673, d. 735; monk of Jarrow, Doctor of the Church,historian, and commentator.
St. Aldhelm (England), d. 709; Abbot of Malmesbury and Bishop of Sherborne.
Alcuin (England), d. 804, monk of York; founder of schools in France underCharlemagne.
Rabanus Maurus (Germany), d. 856; Archbishop of Mainz.
St. Paschasius Radbertus (Germany), d. 860; Abbot of Corbie.
Ratramnus (Germany), d. 866; a monk of Corbie, who took part inSacramentarian controversy.
Walafrid Strabo (Germany), d. 849; a monk of Fulda, and afterwards Abbotof Reichenau.
Abbon of Fleury (France), tenth century; at one time a monk at Canterbury.
Notker (Switzerland), d. 1022; a monk of St. Gall; theologican,mathematician, and musician.
Guido d'Arezzo (Italy), died c. 1028; inventor of the gamut.
Hermannus Contractus (Germany), eleventh century; a monk of St. Gall;learned in Eastern languages; author of the Salve Regina.
Paul Warnefrid, or Paul the Deacon (Italy), eighth century; historian andteacher (scholasticus) at Monte Cassino.
Hincmar (France), d. 882; a monk of St. Denis; Archbishop of Reims (845).
St. Peter Damian (Italy), b. 988, d. 1072; a monk of the reform at FonteAvellano; Cardinal Bishop of Ostia (1057).
Lanfranc (Italy), b. 1005 in Lombardy, d. at Canterbury, 1089; a monk atBeck (1042); founder of the school there; Archbishop of Canterbury (1070).
St. Anselm (Italy), b. 1033 in Piedmont, d. 1109; a monk at Bec (1060);Abbot of Bec (1078); Archbishop of Canterbury (1093); usually considered thefirst scholastic.
Eadmer (England), d. 1137; a monk of Canterbury and disciple of St. Anselm,whose life he wrote.
The English historians; Florence of Worcester, d. 1118; Simeon of Durham,d. 1130; Jocelin de Brakelonde, d. 1200, a monk and chronicler of Bury St.Edmunds; Matthew Paris, d. 1259, a monk of St. Albans; William of Malmesbury,died c. 1143; Gervase of Canterbury, died c. 1205; Roger of Wendover, d. 1237, amonk of St. Albans.
Peter the Deacon (Italy), died c. 1140; a monk of Monte Cassino.
Adam Easton (England), d. 1397, a monk of Norwich; Cardinal (1380).
John Lydgate (England), died c. 1450; a monk of Bury St. Edmunds; poet.
John Wheathamstead (England), d. 1440; Abbot of St. Albans.
Johannes Trithemius (Germany), b. 1462, d. 1516; Abbot of Spanheim, avoluminous writer and great traveller.
Louis Blosius (Belgium), b. 1506, d. 1566; Abbot of Liessies (1530);author of the Mirror for Monks.
Juan de Castaniza (Spain), d. 1599; a monk of St. Saviour's, Onna.
Benedict van Haeften (Belgium), b. 1588, d. 1648; Prior of Afflighem.
Clement Reyner (England), b. 1589, d. 1651; a monk at Dieulouard (1610);Abbot of Lamspring (1643).
Augustine Baker (England), b. 1575; d. 1641; a monk of Dieulouard andauthor of Sancta Sophia.
Augustine Calmet (France), b. 1672, d. 1757; Abbot of Senones-en-Vosges;best known for his Dictionary of the Bible.
Carolus Meichelbeck (Bavaria), b. 1669; d. 1734; librarian and historianof Benediktbeuern.
Magnoald Ziegelbauer (Germany), 1689, d. 1750; author of a literaryhistory of the Order of St. Benedict.
Marquard Herrgott (Germany), b. 1694, d. 1762; a monk of St.-Blasien.
Suitbert Baumer (Germany), b. 1845, d. 1894; a monk of Beuron.
Luigi Tosti (Italy), b. 1811, d. 1897; abbot; Vice-Archivist to the HolySee.
J. B. F. Pitra (France), b. 1812, d. 1889; a monk of Solesmes;Cardinal-Bishop of Frascati (1863); librarian of the Holy Roman Church.
Francis Aidan Gasquet (England), b. 1846; a monk of Downside andAbbot-President of the English Benedictine congregation.
Fernand Cabrol (France), b. 1855; Abbot of Farnborough (Gallicancongregation).
Jean Besse (France), b. 1861; a monk of Ligugé.
Germain Morin, of the Beuronese congregation, b. 1861.
John Chapman, of the Beuronese congregation, b. 1865. *
Edward Cuthbert Butler (England), b. 1858; Abbot of Downside (1906).

The Congregation of St.-Maur

The following are some of the chief writers of this congregation:
Adrien Langlois, d. 1627; one of the first Maurists.
Nicolas Menard, b. 1585, d. 1644.
Gregoire Tarrisse, b. 1575, d. 1648; first Superior General of thecongregation.
Luc d'Achery, b. 1609, d. 1685.
Antoine-Joseph Mege, b. 1625, d. 1691.
Louis Bulteau, b. 1625, d. 1693.
Michel Germain, b. 1645, d. 1694; a companion of Mabillon.
Claude Martin, b. 1619, d. 1707; the greatest of the Maurists.
Thierry Ruinart, b. 1657, d. 1709; a companion and biographer of Mabillon.
Francois Lamy, b. 1636, d. 1711.
Pierre Coustant, b. 1654, d. 1721.
Denis de Sainte-Marthe, b. 1650, d. 1725.
Julien Garnier, b. 1670, d. 1725.
Edmond Martene, b. 1654, d. 1739.
Ursin Durand, b. 1682, d. 1773.
Bernard de Montefaucon, b. 1655, d. 1741.
Rene-Prosper Tassin, d. 1777.

Bishops, Monks, Martyrs, etc.

St. Laurence (Italy), d. 619; came to England with St. Augustine (597), whomhe succeeded as Archbishop of Canterbury (604).
St. Mellitus (Italy), d. 624; a Roman abbot, sent to England with othermonks to assist St. Augustine (601); founder of St. Paul's, London, and firstBishop of London (604); Archbishop of Canterbury (619).
St. Justus (Italy), d. 627; came to England (601); first Bishop ofRochester (604) and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury (624).
St. Paulinus of York (Italy), d. 644; came to England (601); first Bishopof York (625); Bishop of Rochester (633).
St. Odo (England), d. 961; Archbishop of Canterbury.
St. Elphege or Aelfheah (England), d. 1012; Archbishop of Canterbury(1006); killed by the Danes.
St. Oswald (England), d. 992; nephew of St. Odo of Canterbury; Bishop ofWorcester (959); Archbishop of York (972).
St. Bertin (France), b. 597, d. 709; Abbot of Saint-Omer.
St. Botolph (England), d. 655; abbot.
St. Wilfrid, born c. 634, d. 709; Bishop of York.
St. Cuthbert, d. 687; Bishop of Landisfarne.
St. John of Beverley, d. 721; Bishop of Hexham.
St. Swithin, d. 862; Bishop of Winchester.
St. Ethelwold, d. 984; Bishop of Winchester.
St. Wulfstan, d. 1095; Bishop of Worcester.
St. Aelred, b. 1109, d. 1166; Abbot of Rievaulx, Yorkshire.
St. Thomas of Canterbury or Thomas Becket, born c. 1117, martyred 1170;Chancellor of England (1155); Archbishop of Canterbury (1162).
St. Edmund Rich, d. 1240; Archbishop of Canterbury (1234); died in exile.
Suger (France), b. 1081, d. 1151; Abbot of St. Denis and Regent of France.
Bl. Richard Whiting, abbot of Glastonbury,
Bl. Roger James, and Bl. John Thorn, monks of Glastonbury;
Bl. Hugh Faringdon, Abbot of Reading,
Bl. William Eynon, and Bl. John Rugg, monks of Reading; and Bl. John Beche,Abbot of Colchester; all executed (1539) for denying the supremacy of Henry VIIIin ecclesiastical matters.
John de f*ckenham (or Howman), d. 1585; last Abbot of Westminster; died inprison.
Sigebert Buckley, born c. 1517, d. 1610; a monk of Westminster; the linkbetween the old and new English congregations.
Ven. John Roberts, born c. 1575, martyred 1610; founder of St. Gregory's,Douai.
William Gabriel Gifford, b. 1554, d. 1629; professor of theology at Reims(1582); Dean of Lille (1597); a monk at Dieulouard (1609); Archbishop of Reims(1622).
Leander of St. Martin (John Jones), b. 1575, d. 1635; President of theEnglish congregation and Prior of St. Gregory's, Douai.
Philip Ellis, b. 1653, d. 1726; Vicar Apostolic of the Western District(1688); transferred to Segni, Italy (1708).
Charles Walmesley, b. 1722, d. 1797; Vicar Apostolic of the WesternDistrict (1764); a Doctor of the Sorbonne and F. R. S. William Placid Morris, b.1794, d. 1872; a monk of Downside; Vicar Apostolic of Mauritius (1832).
John Bede Polding, b. 1794, d. 1877; a monk of Downside; Vicar Apostolicin Australia (1834); first Archbishop of Sydney (1851).
William Bernard Ullathorne, b. 1806, d. 1889; a monk of Downside; VicarApostolic of the Western District (1846); transferred to Birmingham (1850);resigned (1888).
Roger Bede Vaughan, b. 1834, d. 1883; a monk of Downside; Cathedral Priorof Belmont (1863); coadjutor to Archbishop Polding (1872); succeeded asArchbishop of Sydney (1877).
Cardinal Sanfelice (Italy), b. 1834, d. 1897; Archbishop of Naples;formerly Abbot of La Cava.
Joseph Pothier (France), b. 1835; inaugurator of the Solesmes school ofplain-chant; Abbot of Fontanelle (1898).
Andre Mocquereau (France), b. 1849; Prior of Solesmes and successor to DomPothier as leader of the school.
John Cuthbert Hedley, b. 1837; a monk of Ampleforth; consecrated CoadjutorBishop of Newport (1873); succeeded as Bishop (1881).
Benedetto Bonazzi (Italy), b. 1840; Abbot of La Cava (1894); Archbishop ofBenevento (1902).
Domenico Serafini (Italy), b. 1852; Abbot General of the CassineseCongregation of Primitive Observance (1886); Archbishop of Spoleto (1900).
Hildebrand de Hemptinne (Belgium), b. 1849; Abbot Primate of the order;Abbot of Maredsous (1890); nominated Abbot Primate by Leo XIII (1893).

Nuns

St. Scholastica, died c. 543; sister to St. Benedict.
Among English Benedictine nuns, the most celebrated are:
St. Etheldreda, d. 679; Abbess of Ely. St. Ethelburga, died c. 670; Abbessof Barking. St. Hilda, d. 680; Abbess of Whitby.
St. Werburgh, d. 699; Abbess of Chester.
St. Mildred, seventh century; Abbess in Thanet.
St. Walburga, d. 779; a nun of Wimborne; sister to Sts. Willibald andWinnibald; went to Germany with Sts. Lioba and Thecla to assist St. Boniface c.740.
St. Thecla, eighth century; a nun of Wimborne; Abbess of Kitzingen; diedin Germany.
St. Lioba, d. 779; a nun of Wimborne; cousin to St. Boniface; Abbess ofBischofsheim; died in Germany.
Among other Benedictine saints are:
St. Hildegard (Germany), b. 1098, d. 1178; Abbess of Mount St. Rupert.
St. Gertrude the Great (Germany), d. 1292; Abbess of Eisleben in Saxony(1251).
St. Mechtilde, sister to St. Gertrude and nun at Eisleben.
St. Frances of Rome, b. 1384, d. 1440; widow; founded order of Oblates(Collatines) in 1425.

VI. FOUNDATIONS ORIGINATING FROM OR BASED UPON THE BENEDICTINE ORDER

It has already been shown in the first part of this article how the reactionwhich followed the many relaxations and mitigations that had crept into theBenedictine Order produced, from the tenth century onwards, a number of reformsand independent congregations, in each of which a return to the strict letter ofSt. Benedict's Rule was attempted, with certain variations of ideal anddifferences of external organization. That of Cluny was the first, and it wasfollowed, from time to time, by others, all of which are deal with in separatearticles.

St. Chrodegang

Besides those communities which professedly adhered to the Benedictine Rulein all its strictness, there were others founded for some special work orpurpose, which, while not claiming to be Benedictine, took that Rule as thebasis upon which to ground their own particular legislation. The earliestexample of this was instituted by St. Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, who in theyear 760 brought together his cathedral clergy into a kind of community life anddrew up for their guidance a code of rules, based upon that of St. Benedict.These were the first regular canons, and the idea thus started spread veryrapidly to almost every cathedral of France, Germany, and Italy, as well as tosome in England. In the latter country, however, it was not an entirely new idea,for we learn from Bede's Ecclesiastical History (I, xxvii) that even in St.Augustine's time some sort of common life was in vogue amongst the bishops andtheir clergy. St. Chrodegang's institute and its imitations prevailed almostuniversally in the cathedral and collegiate churches until ousted by theintroduction of the Austin Canons.

Carthusians

A word must here be said as to the Carthusian Order, which some writers haveclassed amongst those founded on the Benedictine rule. This supposition is basedchiefly on the fact that they have retained the name of St. Benedict in theirConfiteor, but this was more probably done out of recognition of that saint'sposition as the Patriarch of Western Monasticism than from any idea that theorder was a filiation from the older body. Confusion may also have arisen onaccount of the founder of the Carthusians, St. Bruno, being mistaken for anotherof the same name, who was Abbot of Monte Cassino in the twelfth century andtherefore a Benedictine.

Independent Benedictine Congregations

The various reforms, beginning with Cluny in the tenth century and extendingto the Olivetans of the fourteenth, have been enumerated in the first part ofthis article and are described in greater detail in separate articles, undertheir respective titles. To these must be added the Order of the Humiliati,founded in the twelfth century by certain nobles of Lombardy who, havingrebelled against the Emperor Henry VI, were taken captive by him into Germany.There they commenced the practice of works of piety and penance, and were fortheir humility allowed to return to Lombardy. The order was definitelyestablished in 1134 under the guidance of St. Bernard, who placed it under theBenedictine rule. It flourished for some centuries and had ninety-fourmonasteries, but through popularity and prosperity corruption and irregularitiescrept in, and after an ineffectual attempt at reformation, Pope Pius Vsuppressed the order in 1571. Mention must also be made of the more modernArmenian Benedictine congregation (known as Mechitarists), founded by Mechitarde Petro in the eighteenth century, in communion with the Holy See; this is nowreckoned amongst the non-federated congregations of the order. (See HUMILIATI,MECHITARISTS.)

Quasi-Benedictine Foundations

(1) Military Orders

Hélyot enumerates several military orders as having been based upon that ofSt. Benedict or in some way originating from it. Though founded especially formilitary objects, as for instance the defence of the holy places at Jerusalem,when not so engaged, these knights lived a kind of a religious life incommanderies or preceptories, established on the estates belonging to theirorder. They were not in any sense clerics, but they usually took vows of povertyand obedience, and sometimes also of chastity. In some of the Spanish orders,permission to marry was granted in the seventeenth century. The knightspractised many of the customary monastic austerities, such as fasting andsilence, and they adopted a religious habit with the tunic shortened somewhatfor convenience on horseback. Each order was governed by a Grand Master who hadjurisdiction over the whole order, and under him were the commanders who ruledover the various houses. The following were the military orders connected withthe Benedictine Order, but for fuller details the reader is referred to separatearticles. (a) The Knights Templars, founded in 1118. St. Bernard of Clairvauxdrew up their rule, and they always regarded the Cistercians as their brethren.For this reason they adopted a white dress, to which they added a red cross. Theorder was suppressed in 1312. In Spain there were: (b) The Knights of Calatravafounded in 1158 to assist in protecting Spain against the Moorish invasions. TheKnights of Calatrava owed their origin to the abbot and monks of the Cistercianmonastery of Fitero. The general chapter of Cîteaux drew up a rule of life andexercised a general supervision over them. The black hood and short scapularwhich they wore denoted their connexion with Cîteaux. The order possessedfifty-six commanderies, chiefly in Andalusia. The Nuns of Calatrava wereestablished c. 1219. They were cloistered, observing the rule of the Cisterciannuns and wearing a similar habit, but they were under the jurisdiction of theGrand Master of the knights. (c) Knights of Alcantara, or of San Julian delPereyro, in Castille, founded about the same time and for the same purpose asthe Knights of Calatrava. They adopted a mitigated form of St. Benedict's Rule,to which certain observances borrowed from Calatrava were added. They also usedthe black hood and abbreviated scapular. It was at one time proposed to unitethis order with that of Calatrava, but the scheme failed of execution. Theypossessed thirty-seven commanderies. (d) Knights of Montesa, founded 1316, anoffshoot from Calatrava, instituted by ten knights of that order who placedthemselves under the abbot of Cîteaux instead of their own Grand Master. (e)Knights of St. George of Alfama, founded in 1201; united to the Order of Montesain 1399.

In Portugal there were three orders, also founded for purposes of defenceagainst the Moors:- (f) The Knights of Aviz, founded 1147; they observed theBenedictine Rule, under the direction of the abbots of Cîteaux and Clairvaux,and had forty commanderies. (g) The Knights of St. Michael's Wing, founded 1167;the name was taken in honour of the archangel whose visible assistance secured avictory against the Moors for King Alphonso I of Portugal. The rule was drawn upby the Cistercian Abbot of Alcobaza. They were never very numerous, and theorder did not long survive the king in whose reign it was founded. (h) The Orderof Christ, reared upon the ruins of the Templars about 1317; it became verynumerous and wealthy. It adopted the Rule of St. Benedict and the constitutionsof Cîteaux, and possessed 450 commanderies. In 1550 the office of grand masterof this order, as well as that of Aviz, was united to the crown. (I) The Monksof the Order of Christ. In 1567, a stricter life was instituted in the conventof Thomar, the principal house of the Order of Christ, under this title, wherethe full monastic life was observed, with a habit and vows similar to those ofthe Cistercians, though the monks were under the jurisdiction of the grandmaster of the Knights. This order now exists as one of the noble orders ofknighthood, similar to those of the Garter, Bath, etc., in England. In Savoythere were the two orders: (k) the Knights of St. Maurice, and (l) those of St.Lazarus, which were united in 1572. They observed the Cistercian rule and theobject of their existence was the defence of the Catholic Faith against theinroads of the Protestant Reformation. They had many commanderies and their twoprincipal houses were at Turin and Nice. In Switzerland also the Abbots of St.Gall at one time supported (m) the military Order of the Bear, which FrederickII had instituted in 1213.

(2) Hospitallers

The Order of the Brothers Hospitallers of Burgos originated in a hospitalattached to a convent of Cistercian nuns in that town. There were a dozenCistercian lay brothers who assisted the nuns in the care of the hospital, andthese, in 1474, formed themselves into a new order intended to be independent ofCîteaux. They met with much opposition, and, irregularities having crept in,they were reformed in 1587 and placed under the abbess of the convent.

(3) Oblates

The Oblates of St. Frances of Rome, called also Collatines, were acongregation of pious women, founded in 1425 and approved as an order in 1433.They first observed the rule of the Franciscan Tertiaries, but this was soonchanged for that of St. Benedict. The order consisted chiefly of noble Romanladies, who lived a semi-religious life and devoted themselves to works of pietyand charity. They made no solemn vows, neither were they strictly enclosed, norforbidden to enjoy the use of their possessions. They were at first under thedirection of the Olivetan Benedictines, but after the death of their foundress,in 1440, they became independent.

(4) Orders of Canonesses

Information is but scanty concerning the chapters of noble canonesses, whichwere fairly numerous in Lorraine, Flanders, and Germany in medieval times. Itseems certain, however, that many of them were originally communities ofBenedictine nuns, which, for one reason or another, renounced their solemn vowsand assumed the state of canonesses, whilst still observing some form of theBenedictine Rule. The membership of almost all these chapters was restricted towomen of noble, and in some cases of royal, descent. In many also, whilst thecanonesses were merely seculars, that is, not under vows of religious, andtherefore free to leave and marry, the abbesses retained the character and stateof religious superiors, and as such were solemnly professed as Benedictine nuns.The following list of houses is taken from Mabillon and Hélyot, but all hadceased to exist by the end of the eighteenth century:-In Lorraine: Remiremont;founded 620; members became canonesses in 1515; Epinal, 983; Pouzay,Bouxières-aux-Dames, and Metz, of the eleventh or twelfth century. In Germany:Cologne, 689; Homburg and Strasburg, of the seventh century; Lindau, Buchau, andAndlau of the eighth century; Obermunster, Niedermunster, and Essen of the ninthcentury. In Flanders: Nivelles, Mons, Andenne, Maubeuge, and Belisie of theseventh century; and Denain, 764. The members of the following houses in Germanyhaving renounced their solemn vows and become canonesses in the sixteenthcentury, abandoned also the Catholic Faith and accepted the Protestant religion:Gandersheim, Herford, Quedlinburg, Gernrode.

The Benedictine Order in General. Montalembert, Monksof the West (London, 1896), Eng. Tr., new ed., with preface by Gasquet; Newman,Mission of St. Benedict and Benedictine Schools, in Historical Sketches (London,1873); Gasquet, Sketch of the Life and Mission of St. Benedict (London, 1895);Maitland, The Dark Ages (London, 1845); Mabillon, Annales O. S. B. (Paris,1703-39); Id., Acta SS. O. S. B. (Venice, 1733); Yepez, Chronicon generale Ord.S. P. N. Benedicti (Cologne, 1603); Hélyot, Histoire des ordres religieux (Paris,1792); Id., Dict. Des ordres religieux (Paris, 1860); Mege, Commentaire sur laregle de S. Benoit (Paris, 1687); Calmet, Commentaire (Paris, 1734); Menard,Codex regularum (Paris, 1638); Besse, Le moine benedictin (Ligugé, 1898);Braunmuller in Kirchenlex., s. v.; Herzog, Realencyclopadie (Leipzig, 1897), s.v.; Heimbucher, Die Order und Kongregationen der katholischen Kirche (Paderborn,1896), I; Ziegelbauer, Hist. Lit. O. S. B. (Augsburg, 1754); Album Benedictinum(St. Vincent's, Pennsylvania, 1880; Rome, 1905); Tanner, Notitia Monastica(London, 1744); Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, with Stevens's continuation(London, 1817-30); Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (London,1899); Id., The Eve of the Reformation (London, 18990); Gairdner, Prefaces toCalendars of State Papers of Henry VIII; Taunton, English Black Monks of St.Benedict (London, 1897); Dudden, Gregory the Great (London, 1905), I; Eckenstein,Women under Monasticism (Cambridge, 1896); Hope, St. Boniface and the Conversionof Germany (London, 1872); Reyner, Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia (Douai,1626); Hind, Benedictines in Oxford in Ampleforth Journal, VI, 1901.

Special Congregations. Duckett, Charters and Recordsof Cluni (Lewes, England, 1890); Sackur, Die Cluniacenser (Halle a S., 1892-94);Janauschek, Origines Cisterciensium (Vienna, 1877); Gaillardin, Les Trappistes(Paris, 1844); Guibert, Destruction de Grandmont (Paris, 1877); Salvado, MemorieStoriche (Rome, 1851); Berengier, La Nouvelle-Nursie (Paris, 1878); Brullee, Viede P. Muard (Paris, 1855), tr. Robot, 1882; Thompson, Life of P. Muard (London,1886; de Broglie, Mabillon (Paris, 1888); Id., Montfaucon (Paris, 1891); Houtin,Dom Couturier (Angers, 1899); Van Galoen, Dom Maur Wolter et les origines de lacong. De Beuron (Bruges, 1891); Dolan, Succisa Virescit in Downside Review, I-IV.

Mistake: Abbot John Chapman OSBwas an English Benedictine monk (of Downside Abbey near Bath/England), not aBeuronese. He died 1933.

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Aus: Charles G. Herbermann: The Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company, New York1907 - 1912 - zuletzt aktualisiert am 21.12.2014
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