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Rising From the Ashes: The Legacy of the First Benedictine Monastery

Michie

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Eighty years after its total destruction in the Second World War, the reconstructed Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy stands as a timeless testament to the enduring legacy of its founder, St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism.

ROME — Perched majestically atop a rocky hill 80 miles south of Rome, the first house of the Benedictine order will this year celebrate the 60th anniversary of the proclamation of St. Benedict as the main patron saint of Europe.

Feb. 15 also marks the 80th anniversary of the devastation caused when German forces bombed the abbey during the Second World War’s Battle of Monte Cassino.

“We know that Benedict came to Monte Cassino from Subiaco,” Dom Antonio Luca Fallica, the abbot of the Abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy, told the Register, “where he had begun his monastic life first in an eremitic [hermitical] form, and then in a cenobitic [communal] form.”

Because of the jealousy of a local priest, the abbot explained, St. Benedict decided to leave Subiaco — where he had already founded 12 communities — with a group of disciples, arriving at Monte Cassino around the year 529.

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