Homily for Memorial of St. Benedict

Homily for the Memorial
of St. Benedict
Thursday, 14th Week of Ordinary Time

Year II
July 11, 2024
Collect
Hos 11: 1-4, 8-9
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

The collect for St. Benedict stresses love for God.  That was the core of his life and of his teaching.

St. Benedict of Nursia
Writing the Benedictine Rule
(Hermann Nigg)

He was born a few years after the collapse of the Roman Empire.  Western civilization descended into political, social, and moral chaos.  Benedict fled that.  How appropriate that today’s 1st reading states, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos 11:1).  God “taught Ephraim to walk, took them in [his] arms” (11:3), and that’s what he did thru Benedict for the reconstruction of civilization in Europe, drawing him and succeeding generations “with bands of love” (11:4).

Benedict and the monastic community that grew up around him focused their lives on “divine service,” as the collect says.  That meant prayer, especially the Liturgy of the Hours, and hard, self-sustaining work.  Thus the motto “Work and Prayer.”  Their prayer centered them on God but interceded for the world.  Their work was their livelihood but enhanced the world around them.  The word monk may be rooted in solitude, separation from the world.  But Benedict’s monks offered a “school of divine service,” teaching their neighbors not only how to pray but also how to improve their fields and to learn artisanal skills and to study.  They laid the foundation for a new civilization in Europe.  That’s why St. John Paul II declared Benedict one of the continent’s patron saints.

Benedict XVI recognized Benedict as the patron of his pontificate.[1]  He also recognized in our time a decline of European civilization like that in the 6th century.  Europe, he lamented, has lost its Christian roots.  We see new forms of political, social, and moral chaos, and not only in Europe.  The solution now is the same as in the 6th century:  to seek God alone, to love God above all else, and to share that love with our brothers and sisters.  “The great monk,” Benedict XVI believed, “is still a true master at whose school we can learn to become proficient in true humanism”[2]—a humanism that knows who we are and what a great destiny God has chosen us for.

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[1] Benedict XVI, public audience, April 9, 2008, in Church Fathers and Teachers from Saint Leo the Great to Peter Lombard (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010), p. 19.

[2] Ibid., p. 24.