Dom Donald's Blog: St Romuald Mass Thursday 11th Week Ord Time

Night Office Saints,

http://www.monasterodicamaldoli.it/

St Romuald June 19.

Portrait St. Romuald (FaceBook)

Christ is a gentle leader, but he calls us to total holiness. Now and then men and women are raised up to challenge us by the absoluteness of their dedication, the vigour of their spirit, the depths of their conversion. The fact that we cannot duplicate their lives does not change the call to us to be totally open to God in our own particular circumstances. St Romuald was such a person. He became an important figure among those eleventhcentury monks who sought to reform contemporary monasticism in the direction of greater solitude. The semi-eremitical monastery at Camaldoli became, after his death, the head

of an organized group of houses; these hermit monks sti II exist as a small independent order of Benedictines. St Romuald died in 1027.

A Reading from Thomas Merton.

One of the most venerable and ancient shoots of the primitive Benedictine stock is the Order of Camaldoli. This Order explicitly takes upon itself the task of providing a refuge for the pure contemplative life, in solitude. Born of the intense revival of monastic fervour that swept Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Camaldoli was founded in a high valley of the Apennines, beyond Arezzo, by St Romuald in 1012. Entirely unique in Western monasticism of the present day, the Camaldoli hermitage presents the aspect of an ancient laura-a village of detached cells, clustered around the church. Unlike the typical Charterhouse, whose cells are all next to one another and open out 0!l a common cloister, Camaldoli jealousy insists on the fact that the cells must be separate from one another at least by a distance of twenty or thirty feet. The hermits live, read, work, eat, sleep and meditate in their cells, but gather for the canonical hours in the church. Silence and solitude, essential to the true life of contemplation, are here not a question of "spirit" and of "ideal" but also belong to the letter of the rule. For Camaldoli, like the Chartreuse, realizes that "interior silence" and "interior solitude" do not suffice, by themselves, to guarantee a purely contemplative life. Interior silence may well be the refuge of the monk engaged in a more or less active life, who seeks God in moments of recollection. But the best way to foster interior silence is to preserve exterior silence, and the best way to have interior solitude is not to be alone in a crowd but to be simply and purely alone. The purpose of this solitude is to enable the monk to l ive alone with God in an atmosphere which is most propitious for deep interior prayer. Corporate and liturgical prayer are important in the life of the Church and of the monk but they do not of themselves satisfy the deep need for intimate contact with God in solitary prayer, a need which constitutes the peculiar vocation of the contemplative soul. Liturgical prayer remotely disposes for the grace of contemplation. And this gift

of God, like all his other gifts, is granted to souls as an outpouring of the infinite riches he gives us, in Christ, and in the Mass. But the true fruition of this special gift is not usually possible unless our Eucharistic Communion is somehow prolonged in silent adoration. The hermit's whole life is a life of silent adoration.

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Adapted from Saint of the Day by Leonard Foley, OFM, 197L~, p l39;. Penguin Dictionary of the Saints by D. Attwater; – The Silent Life by T. Merton (B & O, London, 1957) pp112-3.

http://www.abbazie.com/camaldoli/visita_it.html

Time passes and eternity approaches