Blessed Schuster’s Daily Thoughts on the Rule: Ash Wednesday
Blessed Ildephonse Cardinal Schuster (1880-1954), monk, abbot, and finally Archbishop of Milan, was one of the greatest figures in the Benedictine Order in modern times, renowned for his holiness of life, learning, and pastoral zeal. In his multi-volume work Un Pensiero Quotidiano sulla Regola di S. Benedetto (A Daily Thought on the Rule of St Benedict), he offers reflections on the Holy Rule tied to the cycle of the Church’s liturgy. We will be offering translations of some passages from this work in this and upcoming posts. Most of the translations of Scripture and of the Holy Rule are based on Schuster’s Italian rendering of these texts.
Ash Wednesday (Station at S. Sabina)
The Expectation of Easter
- ‘Although the monastic life is represented as a continual Lent, since, however, this virtue belongs to few, we enjoin that at least in these days of Lent we guard diligently the purity of our life, blotting out thus in these holy days the negligences of the other times of the year.’ (Rule, Ch. 49)
In this preamble to his Lenten sermon, the Cassinese Patriarch [St Benedict] takes his inspiration from Saint Leo the Great, and insists on three ideas:
1) The Christian life, and even more so the monastic life, bears the significance of a continual Lent, insofar as it asks for our participation in the Passion of Christ, before being partakers of the glory of the Resurrection.
2) In practice, this ideal is reached by few. Saint Paul already called worldlings inimicos Crucis Christi, ‘enemies of the Cross of Christ’. (Phil 3:18) But even among the souls consecrated to God, the force of habit greatly deadens spiritual sensibility, and instead of brave soldiers of Christ who fight tenaciously against the vices of the flesh and the demons, sometimes in cenobia there gather, as it were, groups of veterans of their fathers’ wars, of monks on holiday…
3) A remedy is proposed to us. Holy Lent represents a solemn and universal course of Spiritual Exercises, for the purpose of reviving us interiorly, and thus expiating the daily negligences of the entire year.
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‘All this we can worthily accomplish if, abstaining from every fault, we attend to prayer accompanied by tears, to spiritual reading, to compunction of heart and to fasting.’ (Rule, Ch. 49)
When Jonah, by God’s order, foretold to the Ninevites that their city would be destroyed after the brief respite of a period of forty days [It. una quaresima, ‘a Lent’], that people suddenly turned to do penance and to appease the divine justice.
Our condition is identical. Over our head, too, an invisible hand has already traced the words Mane, Thecel, Phares: ‘Your days have been numbered. You have been weighed and you do not reach the weight. Your kingdom shall be divided.’ (Dan 5:25)
Nisi poenitentiam egeritis, omnes simul peribitis: ‘Unless you bring yourselves to penance, you shall all perish together.’ (Luke 13:4)
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To appease the divine justice and prepare ourselves better for our particular judgment, the Cassinese Patriarch suggest to us the following means:
1) Si ab omnibus vitiis temperamus. This is the first condition; hence Scripture says: Declina a malo et fac bonum: ‘Draw far away from evil and do good.’ (Ps 33) During this holy time of Lent, we shall keep watch with greater diligence over our acts.
2) Orationi cum fletibus. Saint Benedict supposes that the gift of tears in prayer is common to all his monks.
Unfortunately it is not so. It is a charism that the Paraclete grants to certain special souls, as a reward for their long diligence in attending to prayer.
In our times, we knew the Venerable [now Blessed] Placido Riccardi, who frequently groaned in his prayer.
In the last years of his life, one would hear him from time to time raise his voice in his cell and cry out; such was the force with which God drew him to Himself in prayer.
3) Lectioni. Saint Benedict arranges that, during Holy Lent, we should take up the reading of some Scriptural book or some reliable commentary of the Holy Fathers.
These readings are wisely prearranged by the Abbot. But Saint Benedict adds that the good monks, when they have been entrusted the book by their superior, per ordinem, ex integro legant: ‘Let them read the volume in order and entirely.’ (Rule, Ch. 48)
Skimming here and there, as if to pass the time, is not in accord with the serious spirit of Saint Benedict. He wants the book to be read in order and entirely.
4) Compunctioni cordis. The oratio cum fletibus denotes the habitual state of a soul already possessed entirely by the holy fear of God.
Such was the soul of the Venerable Placido, as I well knew him.
5) Atque abstinentiae. This is not so much a matter of the prescribed ecclesiastical fasts, common at that time to all Christians, as of those numerous and small daily mortifications, which we commonly call fioretti [‘little flowers’].
