Cardinal Schuster: Saint Benedict’s Invitation to Embrace the Way of the Cross
Note: This reflection from Cardinal Schuster was originally written for Quinquagesima Sunday, whose Gospel speaks of Our Lord’s prediction of His Passion. It is presented today as it comments upon the concluding portion of the Prologue to the Holy Rule, customarily read in monasteries today.
PROLOGUE OF OUR MOST HOLY FATHER SAINT BENEDICT TO HIS RULE
7 Jan. 8 May. 7 Sept.
It thus remains for us to establish a school of the Lord’s service, in the disposition of which we hope to establish nothing rough, nothing heavy. Yet should anything be set out a little narrowly, as right reason requires for the emendation of vice or the preservation of charity, thou oughtest not, quaking in fear, to fly salvation’s path, which is not to be entered upon but through a narrow entrance (Matt. 7:14). But as one moves onward in this way of life and in faith, the way of God’s commands is run, heart dilated, through love’s unspeakable sweetness (Ps. 118[119]:32), so that, never forsaking His teaching authority and persevering in His magisterium in the monastery until death, we may participate through patience in the passion of Christ (1 Peter 4:13), and so may merit to be partakers in His Kingdom. Amen.
The Cross in the Life of the Saints
1. ‘Without ever distancing ourselves from His teaching, but persevering faithfully in the community even unto death, by means of penance let us associate ourselves to the passion of Christ, so as to merit to have a part in His Kingdom.’ (Rule, Prologue)
In the Sacro Speco [Holy Cave] of Subiaco, before the marble statue of the adolescent Benedict which makes its abode in that grotto, there is planted a Cross of wood, which is meant to be the explanation of that drama.
The Patriarch of Western Monasticism abandoned the delights of Imperial Rome, withdrawing into that desert, because to the comforts of the world he preferred to bear with the Saints the improperium Christi (Heb 11:26, ‘the reproach of Christ’).
Thus, Abbot Gersenio writes in the Imitation of Christ: Vere vita monachi Crux est. (‘Truly, the life of the monk is the Cross!’)1
Some sentimental souls speak of coming to the monastery to seek paradise on earth! Banish the illusions. The monastic life is a very serious thing.
It is a matter of following Christ more closely on the Via Crucis: Passionibus Christi per patientiam participemus (Rule, Prologue, ‘By the exercise of patience, let us enter into a share of the Passion of Christ’); whence the Patriarch [Saint Benedict] writes of monks: et ideo angustam viam arripiunt (Rule, Chapter 5, ‘And therefore they seize hold of the narrow way’). To arrive at the city of God, we tread here the quick road of the Gospel.
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2. In the Gospel the Lord invites the Apostles, as it were, to accompany Him to the Passion, unfolding before them the sad drama which a few weeks later will have to be carried out in the Holy City.2
Peter finds that this is not too much to his taste, and he would like to dissuade Christ from it; Jesus responds with unaccustomed vigour: ‘Depart from Me, O tempter. You do not have the taste for the things of God, but for those of the world.’ (Matt 16:23)
Terrible words, pronounced against him whom Jesus was choosing at the same time as the foundation and head of His Church. He who does not love and does not understand the Cross has not the spirit of Christ, nor that of a good monk. He reveals in this the tastes of a schoolboy.
To a novice at St Paul’s in Rome who loved the Latin poets more than the Divine Office, the abbot, Don Boniface [Öslander] once said: ‘He who is of God listens to the word of God: you do not listen to it, because you do not come from God.’
And he was dismissed from the novitiate.
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3. The Apostle Saint Peter, in his Letters, does not cease to recommend to us the habitual remembrance of the Passion of Christ: Christo igitur passo in carne, et vos eadem cogitatione armamini. (1 Peter 4:1, ‘Since, then, Christ, suffered in the flesh, you too arm yourselves with the same conviction.’) Note well the force of the language: ‘ARMAMINI’. [Arm yourselves.] Saint Paul does the same, especially when he writes: Christo confixus sum cruci, vivo ego iam non ego; vivit vero in me Christus. (Gal 2:19, ‘I am fixed to the cross of Christ, so that I live, no longer I, but Christ Who lives in me.’) And it could not be otherwise, given that, thanks to Baptism, we have been grafted onto the mystical tree of His death: Complantati facti sumus similitudini mortis eius. (Rom 6:5, ‘We have been grafted onto the Crucified, as if to live again His death.’)
The Cassinese Patriarch [Saint Benedict] himself also presents the Crucified One as the perfect monk, as a shining example of obedience, and he writes: The third degree of humility is when the obedient monk subjects himself in every circumstance to the superior, in order thus to imitate the Lord, of Whom the Apostle writes: He became obedient even to death.
1 Translator’s note: Blessed Schuster ascribes The Imitation of Christ to the 13th-century Abbot Giovanni Gersenio of Vercelli, rather than to Thomas à Kempis to whom it is usually ascribed today.↩
2 Translator’s Note: The original text begins, ‘On this Sunday preceding by a few days the great Lent of the Pasch, the Lord invites…’ The Gospel for that Sunday is Luke 18:31-43, but Schuster goes on to refer to a similar passage in Matthew 16:21-23.↩