Meditation of Abbot Primate

A few months ago, in response to the Jubilee theme "Places of Hope Since 529", I received an email from confreres asking me to write about "hope without hope". They were hoping for a word for those communities whose history is foreseeably coming to an end. And indeed, there are quite a few of them in our Order.

The decline of monastic communities is part of history. We know this, of course, but we sometimes push it aside. Recently, I was leafing through the Monasticon Italiae and noticed that over various centuries there have been a total of around 170 Benedictine monasteries in Rome. Currently, there are about ten!

We are naturally delighted, and not a little proud, that there are some monasteries with a genuine history of more than a thousand years. But the monasteries that no longer exist were also important. There, brothers and sisters lived out their faith and their vows for decades or centuries, shaping their time and land with their prayer and radiating an influence on their surroundings.

Finitude and mortality are part of human life. The Rule exhorts us to keep death daily before our eyes. This is primarily said for each individual. But monasteries are not promised eternal life either, unlike the Church as a whole. Benedict himself foresaw the destruction of Montecassino. A fresco in Montecassino shows him with tears on his face at the vision of the destroyed monastery.

The demise of a monastery is not merely a catastrophe or a failure. Above all, it is also a task that must be shaped. What should remain? What can be passed on from the monastery's heritage, and how? How can we help the brothers or sisters remain faithful to their vocation until the very end?

I do not wish to minimise this. There is pain and often, no doubt, the gnawing doubt: What did we do wrong? Letting go as a virtue also means being able to detach oneself from these questions. It is the hour of the Nunc Dimittis, understood in an Easter sense.

The discernment of spirits is also important here. When should a community really seriously prepare for its end? If you are only driven by circumstances, it is too late. Then it often becomes miserable, or one becomes a caricature or a plaything of the media, as recently happened to a convent of nuns in Austria.

However, I am also against giving up too early. Monasteries that actually still have strength, but perhaps out of a misunderstood resignation to fate, block their own path to the future. One should always leave a loophole open for the grace of God.

There is the beautiful story of Sigebert Buckley, the last monk of Westminster Abbey, the last English monastery. The 90-year-old, who had to spend the twilight of his life under house arrest after the dissolution of the monastery, clothed two young Englishmen in 1607, who became the nucleus for the renewal of the English Benedictine Congregation. One cannot count on such things, but the Succisa Virescit—this motif of our monastic tradition featuring a tree stump from which a new branch grows—has more than once allowed new blossoms to grow from very unpromising disruptions and transitions. Though monasteries may decline, Benedictine life carries much vitality within itself and is still needed in our Church. Therefore, I am not anxious about the future of our Order.

In Montecassino, opposite the fresco of the weeping Benedict, is another image: the vision of the passing of Saint Scholastica. Alongside the continuation or decline of our monastic communities, there is always the individual. Our Benedictine life paths are closely interwoven with our monasteries and communities, but we also remain monachos—solitaries, persons and individuals on the way to God. This is the deepest mystery of our life, before which even the history of our institutions loses its significance, however important and moving it may be. This is where the deepest hope has its place, and here, perhaps even more than in monastic historiography, Benedict's maxim applies: Never despair of God's mercy. This sounds like a commandment, but it is actually a promise, and the deepest ground of our hope.

At the beginning of July, I was in Russia with some confreres and sisters. This journey, which took place under difficult circumstances, was entirely monastic in its focus: It was about meeting monks and nuns who have hardly any international contacts left. When I returned, our students had already left, and the last professors are now also departing for their monasteries. What remains is a small core team that maintains the life and prayer in the house and accompanies the various summer programmes—oblate studies, leadership course and sabbatical. I myself will be in Germany and Austria a few times, but there will only be enough time for a short holiday in the autumn. Before that, we will celebrate the CIB Symposium here in Rome, and then in mid-September the Synod of Presidents in Rwanda. By then, it will already be two years since the Congress of Abbots at which I was elected—time for an interim review.

In many places, the holidays have now begun, and I wish everyone a few weeks that are somewhat more peaceful than the usual annual cycle. Among us Benedictines, it is no secret that, as children of the 21st century, we also experience the rhythms of our contemporaries. Hopefully somewhat more moderately than many others, so that we too can be "places of hope" in this regard, since 529.

With warm greetings from Rome,

Jeremias Schröder, OSB, Abbot Primate