#camaldolese

[lily-of-christ]

Camaldolese nun, Złoczew, Poland.

[foreverpraying]

June 19 is the feast day of St. Romuald, abbot

Source of picture: https://americaneedsfatima.org

Life of St. Romuald

In the midst of a wasted youth, Romuald watched his father kill a relative in a duel over property. In horror he fled to a monastery near Ravenna. After three years, some of the monks found him to be uncomfortably holy and eased him out.

Romuald spent the next 30 years going about Italy, founding monasteries and hermitages. He longed to give his life to Christ in martyrdom, and got the pope’s permission to preach the gospel in Hungary. But he was struck with illness as soon as he arrived, and the illness recurred as often as he tried to proceed.

During another period of his life, Romuald suffered great spiritual dryness. One day as he was praying Psalm 31 (“I will give you understanding and I will instruct you”), he was given an extraordinary light and spirit which never left him.

Source of picture: https://anastpaul.com

At the next monastery where he stayed, Romuald was accused of a scandalous crime by a young nobleman he had rebuked for a dissolute life. Amazingly, his fellow monks believed the accusation. He was given a severe penance, forbidden from offering Mass, and excommunicated—an unjust sentence that he endured in silence for six months.

The most famous of the monasteries Romuald founded was that of the Camaldoli in Tuscany. Here began the Order of the Camaldolese Benedictines, uniting the monastic and eremitical lives. In later life Romuald’s own father became a monk, wavered, and was kept faithful by the encouragement of his son.

Source: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-romuald

 Quotes from St. Romuald

Alessandro Magnasco: Three Camaldolese Monks in Ecstatic Prayer

“Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms – never leave it.”

"Better to pray one Psalm with devotion and compunction than a hundred with distraction."

[spiritualdirections]

St. Romuald, Father of Western Eremeticism

The “eremetical life” is the life of the hermit, while the “cenobetic life” is the life of the monk. St. Paul of Thebes and St. Antony of Egypt who lived by themselves in the Egyptian desert, are considered the founders of this way of life. Over time, groups of men gathered around such “desert fathers” and formed into monastic communities. St. Basil and St. Pachomius wrote out rules of life for these communities, which organized men of different personalities and capacities for austerity into a communal life leading them to God. Both forms of life were well established by the end of the 4th century.

In the 6th century, St. Benedict of Nursia adapted Eastern monasticism to the Western Church. Europe doesn’t have deserts, but especially as the Roman empire declined, the forests and mountains provided the necessary solitude for monasteries. It wasn’t until the 10th century, however, that the Western Church had its first organized eremetical life, thanks in large part to St. Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolese Order. 

Romuald was an unusual figure. In the early 970s, he entered a monastery in Northern Italy in order to atone for his father’s sin of killing a man in a duel. He quickly found himself drawn to a more austere form of life, more strictly following the Rule of St. Benedict than others. He annoyed his fellow monks by trying to reform their monastery, and after a time he was given permission to leave so as to apprentice himself to a self-taught hermit named Marinus and live the severe life he desired. This was the first instance of a repeated cycle in his life--he would become associated with a monastery, try to reform it, find resistance among the monks to his reforms, and then he would retire once again to be a recluse.

Eventually, he founded an order organized around the eremetical life, but that was built on the cenobetic or monastic life in the following way: A person entering the Camaldolese Order would enter as a typical monk according to St. Benedict’s Rule. Then after a time, when he had learned the habits of prayer and mortification, he could move out to the edge of the monastery’s property to live as a hermit. In other words, being a monk (living in community under an abbot) was reconceived as simply a stage in one’s progression to living as a hermit, without an abbot, but in a stricter life of reclusion (and therefore silence), devoting one’s whole day to prayer and the study of scripture. The hermits would depend on the monastery for many of their basic needs, and also to guard the privacy of the hermits. Camaldolese monasteries were always supposed to have a place to care for the sick or infirm hermits. Yet the hermits were not seen to be dependent on the monastery; the monastery was supposed to take orders from the hermitage, so that the whole society would be ordered by the guidance of the hermits, not the needs of the regular monks. 

The hermits would come together for meals and on feast days, and do so joyfully; one wasn’t supposed to become a hermit because one found people to be annoying. In fact, the life of a hermit was a life dedicated to charity, the love of God and of neighbor. The goal of the hermit was to fight the devil, to engage in spiritual combat and extend God’s kingdom, just as Jesus went into the wilderness to be tested by the devil at the beginning of his ministry. And in doing so, strengthen the mystical Body of Christ. 

St. Romuald was a hugely important figure in his day, forming saints, missionaries, martyrs, and kings. St. Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor of the Church, was his most famous disciple. The Holy Roman Emperor Otto III was also a disciple for a time. Romualds example of hermits living in community, and his writings about the spiritual life of hermits, inspired St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians. His feast day is June 19, a good time to remember this largely forgotten saint.

[servus-immaculatae]

St. Romuald by Guercino (c. 1640-1641 A. D.)

[lily-of-christ]

Camaldolese monk passing by a woman, Bieniszew, Poland.

[spiritualdirections]

The Lament of a Heroic Prayer Warrior

Often when we are busy, we regret that we lack the time to do all the things we would like, including to pray as much as we’d like. I found the passage below, from Blessed Paul Giustiniani (1476-1528), an abbot and hermit of the Camaldolese Order, to be one of the most consoling things I’ve read in a while. Not even those who have been called from the world to a life of solitude and prayer, whose work is to pray most of the book of Psalms daily, find that they have enough hours in the day. It can remind us that in this life, weighed down by our bodies and their infirmities, the best we can do is not all that we would like to do. We can only offer to God what we have, however poor it may seem, and not all that we’d like to offer to Him.  

Those who have never practiced the occupations of religious leisure imagine that a solitary is constantly overwhelmed by inactivity and idleness, bored stiff, full of regrets, like a sleepy man or an irrational animal that lets the time pass doing nothing. But, my Lord God, I in my solitude speak to You. How it enchants me to speak to You, and when I speak to You I cannot lie... It seems to me that in this, more than in any other way of life, occupations are both lacking and superabundant. No indeed, the life of solitaries is not what some may imagine, inactive and idle. More than any other life, it is active and laborious…

How it is with other solitaries, I do not know. But I can easily believe that each of them manages the leisure of his solitude better than I. As for me, You know, Lord, and You can see that the more solitary I am, the more tasks occur that I ought to do and want to do. But unfortunately through lack of time I must put aside some projects, as if I wanted to save them for another occasion. Those that I do undertake must often, alas, be left uncompleted, because I lack time to finish them as I should, or at least as best I could with God’s help. How often in the leisure of solitude I have postponed prayer because I desired and took pleasure in reading! My application to prayer, weak and cold as it is, keeps me from reading. How often the effort to write down a few thoughts for my own sake or that of others has hindered me from giving due time to prayer and reading! How often, because of one of these occupations, I have put off my next meal or deprived my body, as right now, of the hours of needed rest! I would like to do more; each task seems necessary, each attracts me strongly. Yet I do none perfectly, or even as well as I might with divine help, if I had enough time and if I thought of only one at a time. Some may believe and say that solitaries are inactive and idle, but I shall never cease thinking and saying that no other life is as active and toilsome as that of God’s servant, the hermit. For a time, longer than I would have wished, I experienced worldly affairs and the worries of governing a congregation. In these matters I always seemed impeded more by lack of ability, solicitude, and diligence than by lack of time. With the business of the active life, the more I do, the less there is to do. But in matters of the solitary life, the more ability, solicitude, and diligence I muster, the more I always find to do and the less time to do it. In the exercises of solitary leisure, that is, the contemplative life, the more I do, the more I see to be done. In the active life it is generally enough to prepare and arrange matters well, and then to entrust the execution to others. But the business of the solitary life must all, with God’s help, be arranged and executed by ourselves. The former can, for the most part, be arranged and executed while eating or walking about. The latter is of such nature that each matter requires an entirely free mind and absorbs the whole self...

    But returning to myself: now that by Your grace, Lord, I am more solitary than ever before, I know that I cannot find time to do all I should do and would like to do in Your service…. Oh, how much reading I would like to do, were it not for lack of time and the demands of other duties! Not that I yearn to reread the books of pagan philosophers and poets, for I regret and repent having devoted more time than I should have to such study. But I would like to read many writings that would reveal the hidden and spiritual sense of Your holy Scriptures, many works that might spur my soul to devotion and compunction, much that would help me to distinguish, so to speak, one leprosy from another, one sin from another. Oh, how I wish I could carry Your holy Gospels ever in my hand next to my heart, as we read of the holy virgin Saint Cecilia, that I might never interrupt day or night that divine reading! You know, Lord, that I have often intended to do so; but either I lacked time or my soul was occupied with other things. Not only would I like to read, but I need to apply myself earnestly to understand what is read, to commit to memory the meaning rather than the words, to compare the opinions of several doctors, or several passages of one of them, and to do other similar things, that only those who study can understand…. To read and to write are truly the easiest tasks, the least absorbing and the most imperfect of the solitary’s life…. But he must also meditate, pray, and ascend as much as possible to the contemplation of heavenly realities; think over with bitter regret the ill-used days of his life; examine, describe, dispose, regulate, moderate the passions of the present day; commit the future to God’s service; think of death and prepare for it.

[cesarecitypilgrim]

Chi sono i Camaldolesi? The Camaldolese Benedictine monks: who are They?

SE TI INTERESSANO LE STORIE DI ALTRI ORDINI RELIGIOSI LEGGI QUI IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE HISTORY OF OTHER RELIGIOUS ORDERS READ HERE I Benedettini Camaldolesi, nati nel X secolo, costituiscono un audace tentativo di combinare le due forme di vita più consuete tra gli ordini contemplativi: quella eremitica e quella cenobitica. L’abbazia di Camaldoli, casa-madre e origine del movimento, è la…

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[ridavio]

A work trip took me to Krakow in Poland for almost a week in April and at the end of my time there I had a free half day to bike out along the Vistula river (I believe the longest in Poland?). There is an enormous nature and recreational reserve that extends from the historic city center to out past the airport. I passed this monastery along the way and ended up at another monastery that had a nice brewery.