St. Benedict of Nursia: The Man Who Built the West

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HTM002: He walked out of Rome at 17 because he could see what was coming. The empire was finished. His classmates were interested in pleasure and performance. Benedict left his studies, walked east to a cave above Subiaco, and stayed there for three years in silence.

In episode two of Holy Troublemakers, Dom Bettinelli tells the story of Benedict of Nursia, the man who, more than one historian has argued, saved Western civilization without ever setting out to.

The episode walks through the places. Norcia, the cold hill town in Umbria where Benedict was born around AD 480 to a Roman family that still spoke Latin as its first language. Rome in the late 5th century, down to about 100,000 people from a million at the empire’s height. The cliffside cave above Subiaco, where a monk named Romanuslowered bread on a rope with a small bell attached, and where Benedict learned the discipline that would shape everything afterward: sustained attention to a single moment, hour after hour, without flinching.

When his reputation finally leaked out of the cliffs, a nearby monastery at Vicovaro asked him to be their abbot. They wanted his reputation without the demands that came with it. They tried to poison him. He blessed the cup, the cup shattered, and he walked out with one sentence: “May almighty God have mercy on you, brothers. Why did you do this?”

Back at Subiaco he built twelve small communities of twelve monks each, an early articulation of what Western monasticism would become. A local priest named Florentius tried to undo it, first with a poisoned loaf that Benedict’s tame raven carried off into hiding, then with seven dancing women hired to corrupt the younger monks. Benedict walked away again, this time 80 miles south to Monte Cassino, a hilltop where the locals still left offerings at a temple to Apollo. He tore the temple down, built chapels to John the Baptist and Martin, opened a school for the children of the local nobility, and there, sometime in the 530s, dictated his Rule.

Seventy-three chapters. When to pray, when to sleep, what to eat, how to receive a stranger, how to correct a brother without breaking him, how to treat the sick and the old with special gentleness. “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” It reads like a letter from a man who had figured something out and wanted to pass it on.

The Rule lasted. Monte Cassino did not. It was destroyed by the Lombards around 569, burned by Saracens in 883, leveled by an earthquake in 1349, and bombed to rubble by Allied forces on February 15, 1944. Every time, it was rebuilt. In 1964, Pope Paul VI consecrated the latest rebuild and declared Benedict the patron of Europe.

Dom closes with the thesis underneath the whole story. Benedict didn’t set out to rescue civilization. He set out to find God, and he started by getting very quiet and staying there long enough to actually hear something. Whatever is drowning out what matters most in your life right now, find the cave.

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