Benedictines around the world are looking forward to, and preparing for, a major jubilee in 2029, which marks 1,500 years since the founding of the great Abbey of Monte Cassino. I recently joined a study day at Worth Abbey, under the auspices of the Lay Community of St Benedict, an event in which some forty people, including monks, nuns, and laity met to consider how such a jubilee should be commemorated during (and beyond) 2029. The Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Order, Dom Jeremias Schröder, gave the keynote address, to outline his vision for the jubilee, and pointed out that previous Benedictine jubilees (in 1880 and 1980) had lasting outcomes. After 1880, for instance, the office of Abbot Primate was established, for the first time in the long history of the Order, based at the Pontifical Academy of Sant’Anselmo, on the Aventine in Rome. As a stimulus to our thinking, Abbot Jeremias gave his remarks the title, ‘Places of Hope’.

It’s impossible to over-emphasize the importance of place to Benedictines. Unlike the superiors general of more recently instituted orders, also resident in Rome, the Abbot Primate has no similar jurisdiction over, and responsibility for, all Benedictine houses, which are essentially independent of each other. Houses may be grouped in congregations (the English being one of the oldest), but the monastery as place is, in essentials, the Benedictine world, and the ground of personal transformation in Christ. The three vows of obedience (to an abbot), stability (to remain in the monastery till death), and conversatio morum (commitment to a particular community and to personal transformation in its modes of the spiritual life), constitute the essentials of the Benedictine way. This place (locus iste) is awe-inspiring, full of the fear of the Lord (terribilis est), in the words of Jacob in his transcendent experience of the ladder to heaven. This place is also given by God (a Deo factum est) in the words of the gradual for the Mass of the dedication of a church, and in the words of Bruckner’s famous motet. Both senses of locus iste apply to a Benedictine community.

Such strong places, impregnated by prayer, are a particular help to Christians today, as territorial systems, such as parishes, weaken their hold: people go where they find their spiritual needs can be met. In this, the experience of our time is not unlike that of St Benedict himself when, in the fifth and sixth centuries, the Roman imperium was breaking down, there was widespread movement of peoples, and new political entities were coming into being. Pope St Paul VI, in his apostolic letter Pacis Nuntius of 1964, on the occasion of the re-dedication of the abbey church at Monte Cassino, pointed to how the Benedictines had remade Europe in the image of Christ through three means: the Cross, the Book, and the Plough. Christian Europe would develop principally through the work of monks and nuns: in the evangelization of the Faith; in education and culture; and through the cultivation of the earth, to make it fruitful, a co-operation with the work of the Creator. This work goes on, despite the vicissitudes of Europe over a millennium and a half. Monte Cassino itself, for example, has been destroyed (as it was in the Second World War) and rebuilt many times in its long history.

Like a plant which becomes only the more vigorous with pruning, Benedictine life endures many setbacks and begins again in its work of integrating, humanizing (in its divinizing), re-planting, and adapting in a multiplicity of ways to the needs of the world in particular times and places. Today, Benedictines are not unfamiliar with the digital world, and are presently considering such projects as extending access to its vast store of texts via an online library, and also in the compilation of a complete Benedictine martyrology, both works of service to scholarship. It’s perhaps not entirely a coincidence that 529 AD, the traditional date of the founding of Monte Cassino, was also the year in which the Emperor Justinian, ruling from Byzantium, closed the (Neo-) Platonic Academy in Athens, after nearly a thousand years of learning there. A new kind of learning would be offered to the world by monasticism, including in the project of Cassiodorus at Virarium, in Calabria, a new monastic academy. But Cassiodorus’s programme was quite different from the monasteries of the Benedictine Rule, in which learning is a fully integrated part of the spiritual life, rather than a thing per se, as in a modern university. It is Benedict’s approach, rather than that of Cassiodorus, which has endured in monasticism, and it serves still as a model of deep learning, to engage not only the mind, but also the heart and soul. It is never more needed than in the age of AI.

Certain themes emerged in the course of our study day. Benedictine communities are places of hope partly through being places of beauty and peace, in their commitment to liturgy and private prayer. We might say that ‘being’ comes before ‘doing’ in Benedictine life, and faith is experiential, rather than something that is explained (as the Dominicans do so well, for example), not a first consideration for Benedictines. This may be part of their appeal, and their mission, for the world today, overburdened as it is by so many narratives (political, social, historical, psychological) which lead us (it seems) to ever greater hopelessness about the human future. The first word of St Benedict’s Rule is Listen (in Latin, ausculta or, in some versions, obsculta), and Benedict enjoins us to ‘attend with the ear of the heart’. If we could be receptive, rather than acquisitive, and hear deeply, rather than speak loudly, we might begin to find hope, and be able to bring it to others.

The Benedictine story is a great and inspiring one, central to the history of Western Christianity and culture, and when Pope St Paul VI conferred on St Benedict the title ‘Patron of the Whole of Europe’ he had more than an inkling, I suspect, that Benedict was a key also to Europe’s future. This year, the Abbey Church of Our Lady Help of Christians at Worth celebrates its fiftieth anniversary since its dedication, and it is a vigorous, newer shoot from the Benedictine plant which had so much to do with the birth and shaping of the realm of England, for a thousand years before the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. An unusually large proportion (compared to other European countries) of English cathedrals had Benedictine priories attached, and Westminster Abbey, too, remains at the heart of English state governance and religious life. The Rule of St Benedict may be said to have shaped the ideal of English kingship from the very beginning, as Dr Charles Insley has recently argued. England, and the rest of Britain and Europe, continues to benefit from St Benedict’s Rule, and it still has much need of his prayers.