Commentary by Hilary White
ROME, May 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On the Sunday of the Ascension, Pope Benedict XIV, while visiting the ancient town of Cassino south of Rome, told a group of faithful, perhaps without their having noticed it, the secret to saving Europe.
Anyone who has learned to be at all functional in the world has learned that there is an ordering of priorities necessary before any task can be undertaken. One makes a little list of things to do. In regard to the saving of Europe, tottering on the brink of demographic, spiritual and cultural extinction, Pope Benedict has laid out his list of things to do many times.
This past Sunday the pope told the faithful at Cassino to “defeat inner evil” – that evil that we carry around with us all the time – with prayer, before tackling the evils of the world with action.
Standing in the shadow of the mountain on which St. Benedict founded his monastery in the sixth century AD, Pope Benedict said to the thousands gathered in Cassino's Piazza Miranda, “Only by learning, with the grace of Christ, to struggle against and defeat the evil in ourselves and in our relations with others can we become authentic builders of peace and of civil progress.”
This admonition is nothing new; it is the foundation of all genuine Christian spirituality, and was the basis from which the other, original Benedict worked when he gathered his little community of monks together to pray, under the guidance of his sensible Rule, while that other, more ancient Europe was being shaken violently apart.
It has reminded me of a conversation I had several years ago, when I was visiting a monastery in a north eastern state, with a Benedictine monk who had kindly come to the local bus depot to drive me to the nuns' monastery for my Christmas retreat. We passed through the town nearby and I commented how nice it was in that remote part of the country – close enough to the border to walk to Canada, but far enough that civilised depravity had not yet soiled the local clapboard-house and white-picket-fence community. The streets were clean and bedecked with religious Christmas iconography and a little Nativity scene decorated the border guard office.
I had come to this remote location from Toronto, that, with its traffic, garbage strewn streets, street-corner sales girls and proliferating semi-nude advertisements, seemed like another, much nastier, planet. But here, to my great relief, there was nary a leering semi-naked bus shelter advertisement to be seen.
The monk was chaplain to the nuns and had originally come from California, where he had once led the kind of surfer-dude life that one used to see depicted in films in the 1970s. He admitted that he had seen a lot of exposed flesh on the beaches of his youth. I mentioned that I was glad to be away from the often shockingly explicit advertising that seems to be the favoured mode on Toronto's transit system. But I said that the trouble with such images is that once they go into your brain through the eyes, they're in for life; you take them with you wherever you go. It's just the way the human brain works.
He was probably in his sixties and had been a monk a long time. He agreed that the problem of maintaining internal modesty – “custody of the eyes” to use an old-fashioned Catholic expression – was one we have to struggle with for a lifetime. It had been at least 30 years since he had seen a California beach.
He said it is the struggle of most Christians in our times, to maintain inner modesty, to keep up the struggle for virtue in an age when nearly everywhere one's eyes fall, virtue comes under attack. Defeat “inner evil” before giving thought to battling the evils of the world. I spent the next ten days listening to the nuns chanting the Divine Office in Latin, thinking about what he had said. About defeating the “inner evil” that we carry around with us.
This weekend, the pope reminded us that we are to become “authentic builders of peace and of civil progress.” Vatican sensibilities are so finely tuned that no papal word is ever spoken without considering the full effect of the occasion, especially the implications of the place they are spoken. That Pope Benedict said this in the cradle of Benedictine Europe was not an accident.
The monks of the Benedictine order are credited by historians as the ones who first recaptured and preserved the Pax Romana for a foundering post-Imperial Europe, standing then, in the 6th century as again in the 21st, on the edge of an abyss. The ordering of their day placed prayer and inner conversion, “conversion of manners” as the Rule puts it, before any other work. St. Benedict knew then what Pope Benedict says again now: that a disordered mind, an individual spirit harried and hounded by modernity's twisted and depraved “values,” can accomplish nothing but add more chaos in the world.
Benedictine spirituality says to bring order to the inner self, to create a private garden in which the peace of Christ is always present. The Pope said, “Peace is primarily a gift of God, and therefore its power lies in prayer.” But that peace, once acquired, can be cultivated and spread beyond the boundaries of a person's inner monastery.
It's how Europe was built. Pope Benedict thinks it is how it can be saved.