The Last Breath of Saint Benedict
Saint Benedict’s Eucharistic Death
Today, as on almost Thursdays of the year, we are celebrating the Office of the Most Blessed Sacrament.
The Eucharistic significance of Thursday is, of course, rooted above all in the institution of the Most Blessed Sacrament on Maundy Thursday. Also significant for us, as Benedictines, is that the Transitus of Saint Benedict (that is, the death of the holy Patriarch) is believed to have occurred on Maundy Thursday. (See Blessed Ildephonse Schuster OSB, Saint Benedict and His Times, Ch. 60)
Near the end of his account of Saint Benedict’s life in the second book of his Dialogues, Pope Saint Gregory the Great describes how Saint Benedict, having been carried to the oratory, received the Body and Blood of the Lord and expired with his hands lifted in prayer.
A Call for Benedictines to Uninterrupted Adoration
In this Eucharistic death of Saint Benedict — who breathed forth his last breath before the altar and entrusted the last beats of his heart to the Sacred Host — we recognise a mysterious prophetic act that foretells the generation, at the hour fixed by God, of sons of Saint Benedict’s Order who would render to the Most Holy Sacrament adoration and reverence in the celebration of the Opus Dei and in an uninterrupted vigil of love and reparation.
Mother Mectilde’s Interpretation
Such an interpretation of Saint Benedict’s death is based on that given by Mother Mectilde at the end of The True Spirit of the Perpetual Adorers of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. That essential summary of her Institute’s spirituality concludes with Chapter 20, ‘Our Holy Father St. Benedict’s spiritual affinity with the divine Eucharist’, in which she describes the ‘secret’ that she discovered in Saint Benedict’s death ‘when he buried the last moments of his life in the Most Holy Sacrament.’ She exclaims:
‘Do you not see, Sisters, that St. Benedict dies standing up to show us that he breathed forth, with an effort of love, the holy Institute we profess? He conceives it in the Eucharist to be produced twelve centuries later! Oh, my Sisters, how divine is our Institute! How many centuries was it hidden and buried with Jesus in the Host? How long was it in the sacred entrails of the immolated God?…No, no, my Sisters, this was not at all the plan of a human mind; no creature ordered, instituted, or chose it. It is Jesus in the Host who received it from the heart of Saint Benedict, and I can state, my Sisters, that it was taken from no other place than the tabernacle where this great saint deposited it at the last instant of his life.’
Venerable Caterina Lavizzari and Abbot Celestino Colombo
This conviction of Mother Mectilde regarding her own institute, whom she often speaks of as ‘Daughters of the Most Holy Sacrament’, bore additional fruit in the early 20th century in the life of Abbot Celestino Maria Colombo, of the Benedictine congregation of Monte Oliveto. Abbot Celestino’s life was transformed by his contact with the Venerable Mother Caterina Lavizzari, who led a revival of female Benedictine life in Italy through the foundation and aggregation of monasteries of perpetual adoration. He assisted Mother Caterina greatly in her work and was a spiritual father to the monasteries of the Institute, who still remember him with veneration. In time he came truly to embrace Mother Mectilde’s spirit as his own. The annals of the monastery of Seregno contain the following entry on 24 February 1907:
After having studied in depth the constitutions and books of the Institute, after having practiced their spirit to the point of heroism, after having established the community in this same spirit with a patient, enlightened, prudent zeal, he [Father Celestino] asked, as a grace, to possess our holy habit, to practice our holy constitutions, to be a true member of the Institute, a true victim of the Most Holy Sacrament. The religious, with a unanimous transport of joy, received the Eucharistic vow of the Rev. Father. From that day, uninterrupted longings and prayers were raised to Heaven so that the Institute might finally have its complement for the glory of the Eucharist, and so that the last breath of our great father Benedict might also generate for the Host the sons of the Host, the Benedictine Adorers, the priestly victims to support and save the Church in the last most difficult times. And so may it be. (Quoted in Francesca Consolini, ‘Father Celestino Maria Colombo and the Benedictines of Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament in Italy’, in Deus Absconditus, vol. 86, n. 3, July-September 1995, pp. 1-36; translated by a monk of Silverstream Priory)
An Inspiration and Aspiration for Us
It is this grace of being ‘sons of the Host for the Host’ to which we aspire as well. We must of course be prudent and modest in our application of these words to ourselves: we know not when the ‘last’ times will be, although certainly the times we live in are difficult, and the Lord’s return is always drawing nearer. Nor is it we who are to support and save the Church of ourselves: we are rather supported and saved by the Church, who is our Mother and ever remains Christ’s Mystical Body. Yet Our Lord, Who in the Most Blessed Sacrament is ever supporting and saving His Church, wants to make use of souls willing to be offered as victims with Him. We ask that it may be granted to us, with Mother Mectilde and Abbot Celestino, to be among these victims of love and reparation offered to Our Lord, Who in His patience desires that all be converted to Him and live.