History and theology – EDIZIONI L'ISOLA DI PATMOS

THE DECLINE OF MONAQUES. THE PRIEST AND THAT KISS DENIED TO THE ABBE

Faced with the disastrous state in which monasticism or what little remains of it finds itself today, it would be appropriate to remove certain episcopal masks from the abbots, abolish anachronistic privileges such as territorial abbeys, subjecting them - like all members of the regular clergy of other religious orders and congregations - to the authority of the diocesan bishop, according to the current provisions of the Code of Canon Law.

— History and theology —

Author
Ariel S. Levi di Gualdo

PDF print format article

One day I found myself before an elderly bishop emeritus and to a Benedictine abbot in a public ecclesial context.

First I bent my knee to kiss the bishop's hand, because thanks to those hands we were consecrated priests, then I shook hands with the abbot, to whom I had nothing to kiss. E, addressing him first-hand - as I usually do with fellow priests of any age, including elderly people and strangers,” I greeted him: «Nice to meet you dear Brother». The abbot first became purple in the face, then he made two useless efforts: first to get angry over the alleged lèse-majesté attack, then to calm down. What an abbot is to me, we will clarify this at the end with an exhaustive example.

With today's monastic world I don't deny that I have a terrible relationship, but the exact opposite of what one might think, this derives from the profound veneration I have for it, towards whom we should all be grateful. In the history of the Church, where there are also religious orders of great importance which have donated patrimonies of spirituality over the centuries, culture and art, none of these can match Benedictine monasticism, followed by the Carthusian and Cistercian ones. It was certainly the Dominicans who gave religious birth to the titanic figure of Saint Thomas Aquinas, but not only, because many other theologians have made extraordinary contributions, up to contemporaries Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange e Tomas Tyn. but yet, without Benedictine monasticism a Thomas Aquinas could not have existed, him and all the greats to follow. The knowledge on which they relied is based entirely on historical heritage, philosophical, culture that has reached the present day thanks to the extraordinary work of the Benedictines.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, Europe sank into centuries in which administrative structures, legal and cultural structures built over twelve centuries fell apart under the pressure of the Germanic populations who descended from the North. It wasn't a sudden collapse so much as a slow hemorrhage: roads no longer maintained, depopulated cities, libraries dispersed or abandoned to decay, an education that survived only in isolated pockets. It is in this context of disintegration that it fits, providentially, the story of a young Umbrian nobleman born in Norcia around 480, disgusted by the debauchery of the Rome of his studies, who retreated first to a cave in Subiaco and then, towards the 529, he founded on the Montecassino hill - above the remains of a pagan temple - the monastery that would change the history of the Christian West.

Benedict of Nursia he did not simply found a monastery: It was in Montecassino that he wrote the Rule that would structure the religious life of the West for a millennium and a half, condensed in the famous ora and labora. It wasn't an immediate success, nor an invention out of thin air: he drafted his Rule by drawing from Master's Rule, an older and much more rigid anonymous text with Basil's rules, of Cassiano, of Pachomius, correcting its harshness with a more human balance between discipline and respect for the person. For two good centuries, in early medieval Europe, the Benedictine Rule coexisted — and sometimes merged — with competing observances: the Colombian one, brought by the Irish monks of San Colombano, much more austere and penitential, very widespread in Gaul through foundations such as Luxeuil and Bobbio; and right in Bobbio, where the two traditions intertwined in a "mixed rule", one of the richest monastic libraries in Europe was formed.

I was a Visigoth Monaco, Benedetto d'Aniane — born around 747, already an official at the court of Charlemagne before his conversion - to put an end to this coexistence of rules. Founded in 779 his own monastery in Aniane, in Languedoc, Benedict made it a laboratory for returning to the Cassinese Rule in its purest form. He became a trusted advisor to Emperor Louis the Pious, who had the monastery of Inde built for him near Aachen to have him close by, led two decisive synods, in 816 and 817: it was in the latter that the abbots of the entire Carolingian Empire, gathered in Monastic chapter, they imposed the Rule of Saint Benedict as a single rule for each monastery of the Frankish dominions, with only minimal climatic adaptations. From that moment they became "monk" and "Benedictine"., in the West, almost synonymous.

This network of monasteries, ormai uniformata, with his scriptoria he saved what remained of classical and patristic culture from shipwreck. Bobbio, in Monte Cassino, in St. Gallen and Fulda — founded by Sturmio, disciple of Saint Boniface, who had gone to Montecassino to learn the Rule -, generations of scribes patiently copied, between the 7th and 10th centuries, Latin and Greek texts that would otherwise have disappeared forever. The Annales of Tacitus have come down to us thanks to only two monastic codes: the first six books from a 9th-century Carolingian copy, most likely written in Fulda and then kept in Corvey Abbey; the subsequent books — including the famous passage in which Christians are branded as guilty of hatred of the human race — from a codex written in Montecassino in the 11th century. It was therefore the monks who transmitted to us one of the most ferocious anti-Christian pages of antiquity. If we can read the carminas of Gaius Valerius Catullus, including the most lustful ones, we owe it to a single code kept for centuries in the cathedral of Verona: a sign that the Church has saved and transmitted certain texts, certainly not destroyed for their contents.

Among those copied texts there were also the Latin translations that Boethius, in the 6th century, he had made logical works of the Master of Stagira, remained the only Aristotle known in the West for seven hundred years. It was precisely those pages, kept in monasteries, to provide to Anselmo d’Aosta, recognized as the father of scholasticism, the logical tools of his thought, before the rest of the Aristotelian corpus arrived in Europe in the 12th century through Arabic-Latin translations, paving the way for the great synthesis of Thomas Aquinas.

Yet that same uniformity imposed in Aachen, paradoxically, it was not enough to preserve monasticism from decadence. Torn apart after the death of Louis the Pious in 840, the Carolingian Empire dissolved in a civil war between his three sons, closed in 843 by the Treaty of Verdun which divided it into three kingdoms; in the following decades, between further partitions and an ephemeral reunification under Charles the Fat, that structure fell apart until the feudal chaos of the following century. And the entire Church, with it, slipped into what historians call dark age, the "dark ages". A century, he, in which even the throne of Peter became prey to the Roman noble factions and the abbeys - stripped of their spiritual autonomy - were treated as fiefdoms, their abbots appointed not for virtue but for kinship or political convenience, in a system of lay investitures that distorted monastic life from within.

In reaction to this debacle was born in 909 O 910 the abbey of Cluny, in Burgundy, commissioned by Duke William I of Aquitaine as a monastic house free from any secular and episcopal interference, submitted directly to the Apostolic See. Under abbots like Odo, Maiolo and Odilone, Cluny became the center of a true "monastic empire" for two centuries — hundreds of affiliated houses across Western Europe — and the engine of the great ecclesiastical reform of the 11th century. But that very greatness was its downfall in the long run: the wealth and liturgical splendor of Cluni, with their increasingly larger and more ornate churches, already in the following century they aroused fierce criticism from those who were born, in a sense, from the same reforming rib. It was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in its Apology to William the Abbot, to fulminate Cluniac opulence with words that still burn today: "The church shines on the walls.", and in need of the poor" (the Church shines in its walls and remains poor in the poor).

Faced with Cluniac opulence Robert of Molesme, together with Alberico and Stefano Harding, he founded the 21 March 1098 in Cîteaux a new community determined to return to the letter of the Benedictine Rule: real poverty, manual work, buildings stripped of any ornament; even the dress, white instead of black, it was chosen to mark the distance from the Cluniac monks. Thus the Cistercian Order was born, whose first generation of foundations - the so-called "four primordial abbeys" - marked the spiritual geography of Europe: La Ferté, In the 1113, first daughter of Cîteaux; Pontigny, the following year; Clairvaux e Morimond, both in 1115. And it was Clairvaux, under the guidance of its abbot Bernardo, to become the most famous face of the entire Order.

And here the story ends in a bitter circle: not even Cluny, the great reformer of the year 1000, he was saved from the evil he had fought. In 1516, with the Concordat of Bologna between Francis I of France and Leo, the right to choose the abbot of Cluny passed to the Crown: Thus the practice of the commenda was born, therefore the abbey was entrusted to people unrelated to monastic life, often courtiers who had never climbed that Burgundian hill, who limited themselves to collecting the income while the real discipline was left to a prior. At the end of the fifteenth century the monks of Cluny were reduced to just over sixty; In the 1790, when the Revolution suppressed the abbey, just forty remained, led by a commendatory cardinal who had never resided there. Those who had reformed Western monasticism ended, centuries later, exactly like the monasteries from which he was born to correct them.

After these two major reforms developed from within monasticism itself — a sign that the organism, despite getting sick periodically, has always found within himself the energy to heal himself - monasticism began to decline several times in the modern era, this time not due to internal corruption but due to external attack, starting from the French Revolution. The 13 February 1790 the Constituent Assembly decreed the prohibition of religious vows and the suppression of all contemplative orders, judged - verbatim - "totally parasitic": it is from this decree, not by Napoleon, which gave rise to the language of the social uselessness of the monk which the emperor would then make his own twenty years later. Following, in various European countries — in Spain confiscations nineteenth-century, in Portugal of the Aguiar decree of 1834, in the German states already shaken by Habsburg Josephinism - it was Napoleon Bonaparte who struck hard at contemplative religious life: with decree of 8 June 1805 imposed the closure of convents with fewer than twenty-four members and a limited number of religious houses in the area; with the decree of 25 April 1810 definitively abolished «the factories, corporations, congregations, ecclesiastical communities and associations of any nature and denomination", prohibiting anyone from even wearing religious habit.

This was not limited to the Napoleonic era alone but he continued, decades later, in the newborn Kingdom of Italy. The royal decree 7 July 1866, n. 3036, religious orders and congregations "that import common life and have an ecclesiastical character" are suppressed; the law 15 August 1867, n. 3848, he completed the work by liquidating the assets of over twenty-five thousand ecclesiastical entities without the care of souls. It was the so-called "subversion of the ecclesiastical axis": assets accumulated over centuries of history confiscated by the State, libraries and works of art dispersed among museums and public institutions, monasteries transformed into barracks, schools, hospitals, offices, resulting in incalculable and often unfortunately irreparable damage to the European artistic heritage which suffered unprecedented havoc in those years. Only a few abbeys of exceptional artistic value — including, not by chance, Monte Cassino itself, together with Cava dei Tirreni, San Martino delle Scale and the Certosa di Pavia - were declared "national monuments" by the article 33 of the same decree, thus escaping total dispersion, but paying the price of a distorting legal ambiguity between the good of the State and the religious house that drags on, in certain cases, up to the present day.

Monasticism began to revive during the nineteenth century, precisely in those same nations that had recently decimated it. The case of Solesmes was emblematic, ancient Benedictine priory of Sarthe suppressed by the Revolution, than in 1833 a young diocesan priest from Le Mans, Prosper Guéranger, brought back to life with a handful of companions. Raised to an abbey by Gregory XVI in 1837 and placed at the head of the new Benedictine Congregation of France, In just a few decades, Solesmes became the heart of liturgical restoration and Gregorian chant, inspiring refoundations in Europe and new foundations overseas. A similar path, albeit later and more fragile, it was carried out by the Norman abbey of Bec-Hellouin - the same one that had given birth to Saint Anselm as a monastic in the 11th century, also known as Anselm of Aosta or Anselm of Bec and Canterbury, according to the places of his life - suppressed in 1792 and left in ruins for over a century, until in 1948 some Olivetan Benedictine monks, guidance of Dom Paul Grammont, monk of the monastery of Mesnil-Saint-Loup, they revived it, giving it back its ancient abbey title. In the following three decades the community grew to approximately 60 monks; but starting from the beginning of the 1990s a decline began which the official yearbook of the Olivetan Congregation documents as still ongoing in 2020, when the monks of Bec had descended to 14, several of whom are already over eighty. Today the community is further thinned and reduced to about ten monks, to the point that the abbey is no longer governed even by an elected abbot, but by a cloistered prior, under the direct authority of the Abbot General of the Congregation. And here we should ask ourselves: among wildflowers blooming on the strong personality of some single refounder and among the various scattered shooting stars, which monasticism was reborn and developed in those years, alongside such noble experiences as that of Solesmes? Because something, or perhaps many things, they just didn't work, in light of the current state.

In those same decades there was a rebirth very different from those that had occurred previously in history: a monastic re-flowering that is only apparent, than in concrete facts, in the light of later, it was only numerical and in some respects miserable. Monasteries and abbeys were repopulated with young people mainly coming from families of farmers and workers, in an Italy - to take Italy as an example - where poverty was widespread in those years. The birth rate in families was high and many had difficulty feeding their children. It was years, those, in which there were also large migratory flows, especially towards the Americas. The seminar, the convent and the monastery were roads that not only allowed many to be rescued from conditions of poverty, but they could also constitute future help for the family members themselves, especially for those who, entered the secular clergy, they found themselves managing a parish with attached income or ecclesiastical assets.

And here one could arise with accusations of classism towards those who dare to remember, albeit with historical rigor, that until before the great revolutionary purges, Napoleonic and Risorgimento, in certain abbeys and monasteries only the best vocations were selected and admitted, but above all the scions of the best families. The others, plebeians and commoners, except for exceptions that have always existed in the Church, they were welcomed as lay brothers - the so-called lay monks who reached the solemn profession of monastic vows but did not enter the Priestly Order - essentially employed in manual labor, while the others, the priest monks, they also did jobs, but purely intellectual.

This is how abbeys and monasteries became repopulated, but with consequences that today we can analyze with the coldness of those who look at a twentieth century now largely concluded: the massive entrance, out of economic necessity rather than mature vocational discernment, weakened the average quality of the selection over time, just as the number grew. It was a rebirth that resembled a drugged convalescence: the lanes were full again, but the underlying disease - the fragility of discernment upon entry - had not been cured at all, only masked by the large numbers. This progressively generated the worst decline of the abbeys, monasteries and monasticism in general have ever known: a decadence in two stages. First the decline to full monastery, where quantity hid the great qualitative crisis. Then, as a physiological consequence, the decline into a half-empty monastery, after the socio-economic push that had filled the cloisters between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ran out with widespread prosperity with the economic boom after the Second World War, followed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, before which the numbers collapsed quickly and often dramatically.

Between the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies the monastic communities began to depopulate and today, around all of Europe, several hundred historic abbeys and monasteries have been converted into hotels, luxury resorts and spas. Those located within ancient urban centers in private schools, headquarters of large banking institutions and international companies. Since the mid-seventies, to this already disastrous situation, a worse disaster arose, depicted with the evangelical parable of the cloth applied to the tear:

«No one sews a patch of raw fabric onto an old dress, because the patch pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse " (Mt 9,16).

And the patch was that, with the exception of the Carthusian monks — a handful of men, circa 250 in sixteen monasteries scattered around the world, of which just over 30 in Italy distributed in two charterhouses, who have never cared about their number - the other congregations, Benedictines and Cistercians, they threw open the doors to anyone who knocked. Thus, subjects who were no one were welcomed, once, it would have brought me closer, let's not say, to a novitiate, but not even in the parlor of an abbey. E, a few decades later, by abbots of human depth, spiritual and cultural as Dom Prosper Guéranger and Dom Ildefonso Schuster, or monks like Dom Thomas Merton and Dom Jean Leclercq, we moved on to abbots from the world of Milanese fashion, or to monks who have a serious vocational discernment, conducted according to the criteria codified byEducation of 2005 of the Congregation for Catholic Education - which excludes from the seminary and holy orders those with "deeply rooted homosexual tendencies" - would never have led to the profession of monastic vows. Even more so, if arrogance is not admissible for anyone within the Church, least of all should the various congregations of the Benedictine Order and the Cistercian Order allow themselves to do so, as in order to make up the numbers they have been reduced to gathering the elements that we throw out of the seminaries for very serious reasons, mainly moral.

A plastic paradigm of the fall of monasticism contemporary Western world is precisely its historical cradle: the Abbey of Montecassino. Destroyed several times in its thousand-year history - by the Lombards in 581, by the Saracens in 883, finally razed to the ground by Allied bombing 15 February 1944, in the midst of the battle that bears his name — and always rebuilt, the abbey has found itself, in recent times, with an abbot whose exploits would have made de Sade and Apollinaire pale. A humiliating and very sad case which ranges between the use of narcotic substances and the paid services of young gay escorts, scabrous details which we will not return to between these lines, we wrote about it in 2023 and beyond what is contained in that editorial documentation there is nothing else to add (cf.. who). At the beginning of the war the monastic population of Montecassino was made up of priest monks, lay monks with solemn vows, clerics and novices, counted approximately 100 people. Today, the monks residing among that enormous citadel do not even reach 10. After fifteen centuries of history, various destructions and various seasons of cyclical decay, a single wicked abbot was enough to completely raze history to the ground, the monastic culture and spirituality of a symbolic abbey that was reborn even after the bombings of the American allies who, with an unforgivable tactical error, completely razed it to the ground, but she could not be reborn from the deeds of Dom Pietro Vittorelli.

The year was 2010 when during an argument he had with the then Abbot General of the Cistercians, Dom Mauro Esteva and Alsina, who seriously disrespected me as an Italian man and as a priest, intimately: «Signor Abate, you can wear the pectoral cross, the ring in his hand, use the miter and crosier during sacred liturgies, but never forget the sacramental fact, ecclesial and juridical: you are just the aesthetic-liturgical parody of a bishop, why then, in reality, you are nothing more than a priest like me". It was a significant moral slap, especially for a Catalan, but totally due, because with all due respect to the meritorious Cistercian Order it is best not to forget that we members of the so-called "poor" secular clergy - often looked at with an air of condescension by certain subjects - were founded by Jesus Christ during the celebration of the Last Supper, in which the Word of God instituted the Eucharist and the Priesthood. And on his right and on his left there were neither Benedetto da Norcia, nor Robert of Molesme, nor Bernard of Clairvaux, there were the Apostles, Judas included.

Faced with the disastrous state in which monasticism finds itself today or the little that remains, it would be appropriate to remove certain episcopal masks from the abbots, abolish anachronistic privileges such as territorial abbeys, subjecting them - like all members of the regular clergy of other religious orders and congregations - to the authority of the diocesan bishop, according to the current provisions of the Code of Canon Law. It is obvious that religious people should not answer, as a historical order or as a religious congregation to the bishop: they have their own rules, constitutions and religious charism recognized and approved by the Church. But in the exercise of the priestly ministry in the diocesan territory, other than whether they should answer to the bishop, without privileges and exemptions granted precisely to remove them from its jurisdiction, after having disguised an abbot as a parody of a bishop and covered him with privileges and exemptions with the cryptic formula of «Abbey immediately subject to the Holy See», which is concretely equivalent to saying: you have the license to do what you want and as you want.

And here it would be good to ask ourselves: if a bishop, in his capacity as legitimate successor of the Blessed Apostles, governing a suffragan diocese is subject to the supervision of the metropolitan archbishop in the circumstances envisaged (cf.. CIC Can. 436 § 1, n. 1), as well as obliged to consult him if he decides to dissolve his presbyteral council (cf.. CIC Can. 501 §3), it is conceivable that an abbot would reside in that same ecclesiastical province, instead depends directly on the Holy See? Perhaps it would be appropriate for someone to ask themselves a question and then provide a plausible answer, especially in a monastic climate of profound spiritual and moral decay, although the canon states:

«The territorial prelature, or the territorial abbey, it is a specific portion of the people of God, territorially limited, the care of which is entrusted, for special circumstances, to a Prelate or Abbot who governs it in the manner of a diocesan Bishop, as his own shepherd" (CIC can. 370).

Certain privileges have changed over time into absurd situations, in other ways they recall the story of the Cistercian Abbess of Conversano, an abbey of no diocese, a painful historical case also known as the monster of Apulia — of which our canonist editor has already written (cf.. who) — which by virtue of a granted privilege he carried out from 1266 al 1810 functions of diocesan ordinary complete with secular clergy subjected to his jurisdiction.

The story we have retraced, da Montecassino in Cîteaux, from Cluny which fell into the same commandery that had fought until the cloisters filled with vocations gathered in the last century, he says only one thing with absolute coherence: Western monasticism has never died at the hands of an external enemy, not for Napoleon, not for subversive laws, not for the two world wars. He always rose from those wounds, often more alive than before. He dies, if anything, every time he stops asking himself who he welcomes and why, when the number becomes the only criterion and the quality of the vocation the last. Return to the abbots their real measurement, within the authority of the diocesan bishop to whom all religious priests already respond, it is not an affront to the greatness of that legacy: if anything, the only way left to not betray her completely.

From the island of Patmos, 29 September 2026

Father Ariel's latest books

book store WHO

______________________

Dear Readers, this magazine requires management costs that we have always faced only with your free offers. Those who wish to support our apostolic work can send us their contribution through the convenient and safe way PayPal by clicking below: