“Messenger of peace, builder of unity, master of civilization”. This is how Saint Paul VI summarized Benedict. Not a pious figurine for troubled times, but a criterion of discernment: wherever he passes, bonds are born, communities flourish, and the temptation to turn faith into a barricade dissolves.
Benedict did not “invent” communion as a slogan - he made it habitable. His choice of the monastery was not an escape from the world but a conversion of perspective on the world, in order to serve it better. It is the ever-relevant distinction between refuge and form: a shared, ordered life, capable of generating a people. The Rule is not a code for the few, but the minimal architecture of evangelical coexistence: listening, reciprocal obedience, work, prayer,responsibility for one another. “We must establish a school of the Lord’s service,” we read in the Prologue: communion is not improvised, it is learned - in the concreteness of hours, meals, decisions. If communion has become a worn-out word, Benedict restores its weight with three movements.
From solitude to the publicity of the Gospel
The time in the Speco was not misanthropy; it was the necessary passage to become capable of peace around him. Gregory’s Life recalls that, matured through inner struggle, Benedict “decided to found the first monasteries,” and that the move to Montecassino was symbolic: the monastery does not hide; it makes faith visible as a force of life, founding a place that radiates. Around him, people gather, reconcile, and begin anew. Not a sect that selects the “righteous,” but a home that educates to concrete and stable charity.
Communion as a style of governance and speech
Chapter III of the Rule asks the abbot to “consult the community” and to listen, “for it is often to the youngest that God reveals the best solution.” Here communion takes flesh in a shared discernment, far from the oppositions between leaders and people, “true believers” and “unfaithful pastors.” The abbot “holds the place of Christ,” but must help more than dominate; the brother obeys not as a frightened subject but as one who places Christ above personal preferences. It is an ecology of relationships that disarms discord and prevents anyone - even the abbot—from building personal fiefdoms.
Fraternity as economy and measure of desire
The Rule is severe against the vice of ownership and the appropriation of goods, roles, and honors; it distributes what is necessary and places the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the small at the center. There is no communion without shared work, without limits to possession, without fraternal correction that heals without humiliating. Hence Paul VI’s triad when proclaiming Benedict Patron of Europe: the cross, the book, and the plough - worship, culture, and labor as the grammar of a people. This delicate weaving makes communities wide in spirit, not identity enclosures.
In Benedict, communion is not surface politeness; it is an order of love: “Prefer nothing to the love of Christ,” “seek peace and pursue it,” “cultivate good zeal that prefers the other to oneself” (Rule, ch. 72). The monastery thus becomes a beacon of humanity: a place where prayer (the opus Dei) does not escape reality but binds it together - time, labor, memory, languages, peoples. No wonder Europe was born as a spiritual and cultural unity before a political one: a fabric of praying and working houses that saved books, tilled fields, repaired coexistence. It is the “dawn of a new era” that Paul VI saw rising from Montecassino: not propaganda, but a way of life that persuades.
There is one trait that dispels all caricature: Benedict obeys the Church. He does not wield the monastery as a manifesto against legitimate pastors, nor builds altars against altars, nor exacerbates differences to count the “pure.” The Rule teaches to return to order when the ego seeks to divide (ch. 5 on obedience; ch. 69-71 on contention and fraternal obedience). The communion he asks is not ideological - it is ascetic: it requires silence, self-control, preference for the other, and forgiveness before sunset. This is how the fuse of toxic belonging is extinguished.
And what of possessions and prestige? The Life is merciless toward those who seek to use them. When envied and attacked, Benedict does not arm factions - he leaves. When he leads, he corrects; when unnecessary, he withdraws to preserve purity of vision. He does not become a guru, does not traffic in consensus, does not buy alliances: “He dwelt with himself under the gaze of God,” says Gregory, and therefore could generate peace around him. It is inner freedom that makes him father of many, not power.
Benedict XVI read this dynamic with rare clarity: the move from Subiaco to Montecassino marks the passage from necessary cloister to public witness - faith as a visible force of life. Benedict’s work is precisely this: to give birth to communities that take liturgy, labor, study, and mutual care seriously; open communities, for when a monastery is alive, it does not close - it draws others. It does not demonize the world; it transfigures it. Here lies the secret of monasteries as beacons of humanity: not through propaganda, but because they preserve the measure of the human, where time is prayed, earth is worked, fragility is honored, and speech is weighed.
Hence the question that challenges us today - Church, city, movements, parishes - is simple yet uncomfortable: Does our way of believing generate communion or produce sects? Do we have communities where “even the youngest” are truly consulted, where authority helps rather than dominates, where property does not decide relationships, where reconciliation happens before sunset? When we found new monasteries or communities, we must ask sincerely: are we men of communion, or - perhaps in the name of purity and truth - do we sow discord, opposing clergy and faithful, civil and religious communities, “righteous” and “unrighteous”? How often do we build small closed worlds, where we do not withdraw to be with the Lord, but to protect ourselves from others, from those who challenge us, from those God sends to teach us the love we only proclaim. Saint John is unequivocal: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
That is where the truth of faith is measured: in the encounter with the concrete brother, not in the illusion of solitary perfection. And yet, how often we convince ourselves that we are the only righteous, the only ones who “celebrate the truly valid rite,” the only ones who “live the true Benedictine life.” We fail to see that we replicate a caricature - a parody of Benedict himself. He would never imprison grace in a form, nor reduce fidelity to formalism. The Rule is not a fossil to preserve, but a path to embody. Today even Benedict would not apply some norms of his era literally - for example, the common dormitory - because his fidelity was to the Gospel, not to ideology. The holy monk lived fully in his time, and his choices - like those of Francis of Assisi and so many other saints - bear the marks of their age. But Benedict also teaches healthy flexibility, manifested above all in relationships. Think of Saint Scholastica, who begged him to stay even when his schedule required him to return to the monastery. She pleaded, and God himself intervened so that love might prevail. Christ’s teaching is never cold formalism, but incarnate love. And if, out of love, we make an exception, the Lord rejoices more in that gesture than in our rigid observance.
It is true: at noon we may have the Angelus, but Benedict reminds us that every man who knocks at our door is Christ himself. So, if the bell rings for the Angelus and at that same moment someone knocks - where is my worship more authentic? In the choir reciting the prayer, or at the door opening to the Lord who comes to visit? To be children of Benedict means to be purified by the spirit of communion, which does not fear difference, does not idolize form, does not flee history, but inhabits it as the place where God still visits us. The Rule, called “minimal” by its author, asks little and everything: a human measure capable of endurance. It is not nostalgia for the Middle Ages; it is a criterion for discerning whether our spiritual projects are Church or sect.
Benedict desired neither money nor power; he desired God - and for that, he gave Europe a face. His communion is not forced submission, but symphony: different voices tuned to a higher good. It is learned where every day begins anew, in the “school of service” that teaches us to work, pray, think, listen, and forgive. Is that little? It is everything. It is what enables every Christian community - monastery, parish, family, newsroom - to avoid becoming an enclosure of the convinced, and instead become a place where truth is communicated by presence and the Gospel takes flesh in fraternity. If tomorrow someone asked what remains of Benedict, the answer should come without rhetoric: What remains are the communities that still know how to generate communion. And wherever that happens, there already lies a truer Europe.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Silere non possum