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Romuald’s Eremetical Reform

Saint Romuald (+June 19, 1025/27) was a tenth-century monk, who founded the strict Camaldolese Order, named after the benefactor, Maldoli. Impressed by the saint’s way of life, he donated the land on which they built their first monastery (hence, campo-maldoli). But Romuauld only arrived at the ‘narrow path’ after a dissolute youth as a nobleman of the even more dissolute ‘dark ages’ of the tenth-century (according to the perhaps even stricter Peter Damien, who wrote his biography fifteen years after his death). After seeing his father kill someone in a duel, Romuauld renounced the world, and sought spiritual perfection ‘alone with God’, thereby reviving western hermeticism, that strange, solitary life of a hermit. Such was his reputation that he was deputed by the Church to the reform of monasteries, but many monks resisted his call to deepen their discipline and asceticism and be more faithful to their own rules. Alas, prophets are rejected, perhaps especially so, even by their own kith and kin.

Romuald was known as a saint, and his striking personality, the fruit of a life of deep, constant prayer and asceticism, marked the direction and history of Western monasticism forever. The future Pope Gregory XVI (elected 1831, +1846) was a Camaldolese monk, continuing to live as such within the external splendour of the papal apartments, sleeping on a board, rising at 4 a.m., and remaining sparse in his meals, which, according to papal custom until quite recent history, he ate alone. Gregory the monk-Pope is known for his intransigence to the ‘modern world’, summed up in his enigmatic reply when he was show the newly-invented railway: chemin de fer, chemin d’enfer – the ‘road of iron’, the railway, is the road to hell, perhaps for all that it signifies of the restlessness of the modern world, the loss of place and permanence, of local goods locally made, of families rooted to the earth. We might now replace ‘railway’ with ‘automobile’ and ‘airplane’, and wonder with the holy Pontiff whether he had a point.

The Rule of Saint Romuald emphasizes remaining still, within oneself, living and breathing by the Psalms, allowing their words to penetrate our inmost being.

Praise the Lord

Read the Whole Article at https://catholicinsight.com/