July 11th is the feast of St. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine Order. He lived roughly from 480 to 547 AD. A reflection on the impact he had on history will help us understand why Pope Benedict chose his name when he became pope.
During the lifetime of Benedict, the Roman Empire was collapsing and Western Europe was heading into the Dark Ages.
To help us understand today what Benedict's word was like, let's say it was as if these things happened in our day:
- Imagine if our United Staes government collapsed, and with it the economic and security systems also collapsed.
- Imagine if there were no money to fix the highways, no money to ensure the safety of air travel, no money to fund educational institutions, no money to provide for any healthcare whatsoever, no money for the military and police, no money for ensuring health standards for food and no means to get the food to hungry people, and no money for the hungry to buy food.
- Imagine if the boundaries of states collapsed and city-states started fighting over resources with no one to stop the strongest from violating the weak.
- Imagine if traveling became impossible not only because of a broken infrasture but also because travelers, even from one town to another, would be faced with attacks by violent robbers.
- Imagine that the whole order of how things operate fell apart. That's what it was like in the time of St. Benedict.
No wonder Benedict went to a remote spot to get away from it all and to pray, begging God to show the way. Other men sought him out, also realizing that the times were disastrous. So, Benedict gathered whoever came to him and formed a community, an abbey, within which education would continue, structure would be provided, security would be found, food would be provided (and wine too, maybe even brandy!), and God would be praised almost hourly in psalms and hymns.
This was such an appealing life in those dark times that many men came to join, and women in separate monasteries with similar structures. As they grew in numbers they spread out all over Europe, setting up abbeys and monasteries by sources of water, building not only buildings but centers of hope for the dispersed populations who were living in terror. These abbeys and monasteries "hired" the local people to work the farms, trim the vines in the vineyards and make wine, eventually training the people with some talent in the skills of the monks and nuns. And in time these settlements came to be the great cities of Europe, preparing their world for the eventual emergence of Western Civilization.
This is what St. Benedict started, by the grace of God. 1500 years later, our pope sees that we are in a time similar to the dawning of the Dark Ages when education is failing by being focused only on the material, when security is being threatened by a backlash against the relativism that says that anything is OK, and when the light of Christ is being extinguished by a secularized society that has "tired of its own culture, a world that has arrived at a moment in which the need for God is no longer felt, and much less so of Christ, and in which, consequently, it seems that man might construct himself."
This is why Pope Benedict chose this saint's name as his own.
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