We are a Community of religious hermits seeking the privilege of loving God with all our hearts and of receiving His love. We cherish the decent affection among us in a shared life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. And we look for bonds of godly love with the people around us, whom God loves.
We are Christians who seek the Church that the Lord Jesus founded, the original Church, the ancient Church, and the unchanging faith she guides and protects. At our deaths, our lives will have coincided, historically, with the collapse of Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic life. With so many others, we are wearied by innovation, immorality, corruption, and heresy within the Church. With Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, we have sought anchorage and security on the rock of Jesus Christ and His Undivided Church — the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church in its wholeness and wholesome atmosphere.
It has become obvious that the new directions and experiments inaugurated by the Roman Patriarchate following its 1054 splintering off from the original Church have proved to be ruinous, even poisonous. Chief among these innovations was the never-before-attempted (and never-repeated) experiment of a celibate priesthood. The problems we face from these mutilations a thousand years later were faced by faithful men and women a thousand year earlier. We are not alone among Western Catholics seeking the Church, therefore. And we seek spiritual fellowship with the truest guides who preceded us.
For decades members of the Hermitage have followed a young man from Assisi named John. He was named Francis by his stylish, (we would say, "jet set") father. For the name signified fashionable France — something like naming a boy Gucci or Versace today. John, now Francis, accepted this irony even as he rejected the falseness he saw around him: the "glamor life" of his father, the pretensions of his social class, the corrupt and depraved Church, .... the whole world, vain and dangerous and separated from God.
Born little more than a hundred years after the Great Schism,
Francis saw the ancient Church around him everywhere,
for in Italy it lay about in ruins .... yet very much alive in nearby Greece and Asia Minor.
And he grieved.
He grieved for the disordered world.
He grieved for the gored and disordered Church.
He longed for its youthful wholeness ....
and for Gospel life, which was never far from his mind.
In the year 1205,
he sat in a deserted wayside church
gazing upon an icon Cross.
Staring into the Byzantine past,
he heard a voice .... Christ speaking from the Cross!
"Francis, Francis, go and repair my House, for you see it is falling into ruins."
We have heard this story so many times that it is hard to hear it afresh.
Yet, there are clues that waken us.
The disjunction between the words repair and ruins stands out.
How can one repair a ruin?
A ruin, by its nature is beyond repair,
a total loss.
It must be restored.
Francis does freshen up the Chapel of San Damiano where the encounter with Christ has occurred.
But of all the places he might restore,
he chooses a true ruin:
piles of ancient stones from a church built in the 350s,
truly a vestige of the ancient and original Church.
The Church of St. Mary and the Angels, known as Portiuncula (Little Portion),
had been built by hermits of the Valley of Josephat in the Holy Land as a shrine to the Mother of God.
That ruin indeed is a vestige, we should say virginal remnant, of the Church's former wholeness.
We laugh at the idea that Francis responds to the divine command he received by restoring the ruins of a fourth-century church. But ought we laugh no less that Christ would ask Francis to restore only a splinter of the Church He founded? Would not the Founder of the Church see the "ruins" of His Church principally in great fragments that now lay on the earth? Francis makes a good start by restoring a church built in the 300s A.D. And he continues by restoring other structures — physical, spiritual, and social structures of the ancient and original Church.
This famous scene was written by Tommaso da Celana in late medieval Italian (the same language in which Dante Alleghieri wrote the Divina Commedia) which uses the verb riparare meaning to set right a wrong (especially a grave wrong) and to protect. Tommaso da Celano, who is the only source for this story expressed it this way:
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The first work that blessed Francis undertook ....
was to build a house of God He did not try to build a new one, but repaired an old one, restored an ancient one. He did not tear out the foundation but he built upon it. |
As the Church consists of living stones built into a spiritual house, he next turned to the restoration of Christian life, founding two kinds of societies. In a sense, the first simply happened to him. He struck out to live out the original Church life and was joined by fellows. They naturally formed a circle of friends. Rule of life? Don't we already have the Gospel? Francis would ask. And that Gospel witnesses to the Lord's constant teaching that no disciple will lord over any other: "whoever would be first among you must be your slave" (Mk 10:44).
The Western Church he rejected (for he never sought established religious life and decline Holy Orders when offered him) was ranked in stones like a pyramid with the Abbot at the top and Priors and Sub-priors below him. far from being the original Church for which Francis longed and certainly not the blueprint for restoration the Lord Jesus commanded him to follow. The first religious order Francis actually intended to found was a society of man and woman together, of all ages, from all walks of life, raising families, working jobs, and sharing in a spirit of Apostolic love. In the same year 1212, he founded a religious order for women, necessary in a world where women were vulnerable to the bad intentions of men.
We these same intentions for a circle of love,
and not authoritarian hierarchy,
in the rule he wrote for religious hermits (1217-1221):
What exactly did ancient Christian communities look like? This is not an easy question to answer. Certainly, we do well to read the Gospels and especially Jesus' directions to seek servanthood and humility:
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Jesus called them to him and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles
lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mt 20-15). |
The vestiges of life we find in Celtic ruins reflect St. Paul's teachings, expressing the doctrine that all parts of the Body are equally necessary and important. They built small, circular dwelling places, bespeaking common life, without separate quarters for an overlord figure. They worshiped in dome-shaped and circular worship spaces, not hierarchical spaces designed around a throne. Their sacred art was dominated by circles, loops, and intertwining designs, a knitting together of all things, with nothing left out. From what little we know of their social ideals, they eshewed leadership keeping their settlements small and seeking consensus rule. They favored the monastery as their spiritual center not the diocese, which was the basic organizing unit of the hierarchical, Roman Church. Ss. Columba, Brendan, Declan, were committed to monasteries and to Christian community while Roman Missionaries such as St. Patrick sought to found hierarchical dioceses and never communitarian monasteries, as the established Celtic saints had.
What were the religious orders of Francis' own time like? Certainly, they were rigidly hierarchical characterized by lesser and greater prelates. But how do we know about the culture within the monastery walls? We owe a great debt to one of the doctors of the Roman Church, a Benedictine monk named Peter Damian, who wrote a book concerning this culture, entitled The Book of Gomorrah (1051), published at the time of the Great Schism. It turns out that sodomy was practiced "religiously" among these men. And we recall that Anthony of Padua is said to have fled the Augustinian Canons for reasons of corruption and depravity. And where did he flee? He joined Francis and his fratelli in that circle of good fellowship.
Reading Francis' Rule for Hermitages, we sense this ancient spirit: mutual nurturing, not one lording over another — a structure of "mother" and "sons" with a rotation of roles over time. The hermits are to pray together, work together, and eat together. And they are to keep their distance from the world altogether. For the world is the scene of the dog pack and the totem pole, of the alpha dog and big chief. Theirs was to be a holy place, devoid of prelates and other lordlings.
We detect this same atmosphere in the rules of the Celtic monasteries. Sadly, no original rules have survived from the first-through-fifth centuries. What has survived we can only hope to be a kind of amber preserving the earlier rules that were reverenced and drawn upon, as reverence for the elders was a core Celtic value.
From the Rule of Ailbe (c. 500):
Rule of Cill Achid (c. 550):
| Unceasing devotion. Obedience without murmuring. Simplicity of dress. Fasting but not such as would be harmful. Exile [to a Hermitage] without return. Living a life devoid of trifles. Invoking a blessing at all meals. Eating without comment what is placed on the table. Fidelity to reading. Faithful attendance at the hours of prayer. Having no interest in the affairs of the world. Constant cultivation of things of Heaven. Giving encouragements to every weak person. Having a great desire for the Sacrifice of the Mass. Having the greatest reverence for chastity. Lending support to the weak. Making frequent confession. Having contempt for the body but respect for the soul. Kindliness in time of trouble. Serving the infirm. Making the cross-vigil in silence. Having compassion for the sick. Meditation on the Scriptures. Preaching the Good News. Showing reverence to the seniors. Keeping holy the solemn festivals. Unity in chanting. Living in friendship with all. .... Not being overzealous for talk. Purity among men for the good of their souls. Submissive to their master who is their servant. Two things cause more vexation than anything else: lust and gluttony. |
From The Alphabet for Monks (c. 600?)
| Faith and good deeds. Perseverance in desire. Diligence with quietude. Chastity with humility. Fasting with moderation. Poverty with large-heartedness. Reserve in conversation. Distribution with moderation. Endurance but without hostility. Abstinence without comparison. Zeal without discourtesy. Meekness with truth. Confidence without disdain. Fear without contempt. Confession without self-vindication. Teaching with fulfillment. Advancement without retreat. Humility in the face of pridefulness. Gentleness in the face of aggression. Labor without grumbling. Simplicity with prudence. Obedience without favoritism. Devotion without pretense — all of these go to make up holiness. |
Where is our Rule? It is in our striving for holy life. As life is a thing of many moments and many perspectives, so our Rule draws from ancient wisdom to engender an atmosphere where we might grow. A rule should not be a prison-house in which we die. For our religious life was not begun nor ever intended to be adherence to rules but rather a decision truly to live.