Nexus, oct.-nov. 2025

Bulletin of Abbot Primate

The biggest event – not just of the past month but really for a long time – was the visit of Pope Leo XIV here at Sant’Anselmo on 11 November. The occasion was the 125th anniversary of the dedication of our abbey church in 1900. At that time, Pope Leo XIII surely would have wanted to be there, but as the Roman question, i.e., the relationship between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy, had not yet been resolved, he couldn’t leave the Vatican. We thought that his namesake Pope Leo XIV might take things up and invited him – and to our great surprise and joy he accepted. We had two months or so to prepare, and prepare we did, by fixing a few features of Sant’Anselmo, preparing a dignified Benedictine liturgy, sprucing up our sacristy and remembering what the Popes have meant for our house in the past.

Pope Leo XIV stopped here on the way back from a day of rest at Castel Gandolfo. He appeared relaxed and in a very good mood, as befitted our liturgy, which, in the best Benedictine manner, was solemn but without the rigidity some invariably associate with Papal Masses. This may well have been the first time that a Roman Pontiff celebrated Mass at Sant’Anselmo. We know that John XXIII and John Paul II came to the house, but they did not preside over a Eucharist.

The Mass was transmitted live on several channels and can still be found on YouTube.

I would like to highlight two elements from the homily delivered by Pope Leo XIV on 11 November that touched me in a particular way. The first is the image of the heart. The Pope spoke of Sant’Anselmo as “a reality that should aspire to become a beating heart in the great body of the Benedictine world.” To be honest, I would not have dared to express it in that way, for two reasons.

The first has to do with Benedictine sensitivity. At first, the foundation of Sant’Anselmo and of the Benedictine Confederation did not meet enthusiasm everywhere. Not long ago, the archivist of Göttweig showed me correspondence from 1913 in which several abbots hoped that the imminent death of Abbot Primate de Hemptinne might provide an opportunity to “dismantle” a Confederation they considered an un-Benedictine enterprise. History took another direction, and today the existence of both the Confederation and our house in Rome is regarded almost everywhere as a blessing. Yet we should never obscure a simple fact: Real Benedictine life takes place in the monasteries themselves, in the large abbeys and the small priories, in communities scattered across so many regions of the world.

My second hesitation comes from a warning frequently given by Pope Francis. The late Pope often cautioned us against developing a “headquarters mentality,” urging us instead to look toward the peripheries. I always found this very helpful. In any centre of governance — perhaps even here in the Roman Curia — there is a temptation to imagine that what happens there is what truly matters. In the world of politics this may be the case in Washington, Paris, or Palazzo Chigi, but the Church lives in its members, not in a headquarters. The real centre is Christ, not Rome.

For these reasons I listened to Pope Leo’s words with some apprehension. And yet, the Pope did speak them, and they are beautiful words, valuable words. He himself linked the image of the heart with the biblical image of the temple from which living waters flow, bringing life and fruitfulness. There is truth in this, I thought, and we should not hide the light of Sant’Anselmo. Sure, we are not an international headquarters in a military or administrative sense. But we are a place of encounter and experience, a place where relationships are woven, where ideas born in our Benedictine world can be shared and disseminated. The image of the heart evokes the circulation of blood: a shared vitality, an energy that does not exhaust itself but can reach even the most remote parts of the Benedictine world. In this sense, I want to affirm with joy and enthusiasm what Pope Leo said a week ago.

A second element of the homily struck me deeply: the Pope’s phrase that from its origins, monasticism has been “a frontier reality.” He wrote: “Indeed, men and women have always been pushed by their monastic vocation to plant centres of prayer, work, and charity in the most remote and difficult places, often transforming desolate regions into fertile and flourishing landscapes, agriculturally, economically, and above all spiritually”. For me, this resonated with Pope Francis’s theme of the periphery.

Pope Leo expressed this in terms of “frontiers”. It reminded me of the German-American philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. He himself was a Grenzgänger, one who lives on the frontier, and he developed the theological concept of Grenzüberschreitung, the crossing or overcoming of boundaries. For Tillich, the human being always lives at the boundary between the finite and the infinite, the conditioned and the unconditioned, time and eternity, the self and the Other. The boundary is not a wall but a theological place, where human finitude encounters the divine.

Revelation itself is the supreme boundary-crossing: God transcends the distance toward humanity, and humanity is made capable of transcending toward God. The Incarnation is the decisive moment when the boundary between divine and human is traversed. In Christ, Tillich sees the “New Being,” in whom all essential boundaries are crossed: between Creator and creation, heaven and earth, eternity and time, sacred and profane, pure and impure, the chosen people and the nations. The Resurrection is the crossing of the final frontier, death itself. The Church, for Tillich, is the community that continues this movement beyond all boundaries — geographical, linguistic, cultural, political, religious. As you know, I come from the tradition of the Missionary Benedictines, and this reflection has been deeply meaningful for us when considering our missionary vocation.

Pope Leo’s words now also made me rethink monastic life itself in the light of this boundary-crossing. Community life is already a movement beyond the isolation of the individual; our monastic vows express this even more clearly: Obedience means transcending self-will; stability is going beyond inner agitation and unrest; poverty is going beyond the security we want to construct for ourselves; and chastity means to overcome our impulse to possess the other. In this sense, the description of monasticism as a frontier reality is incredibly rich. Thank you, Pope Leo!

Dom Jeremias Schröder, Abbot primate

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