We Do Not Need a New, Very Different St. Benedict, Part II

'With the fall of monasticism, the Church has become the 'Managerial Church' staffed by 'managers', not led by Shepherds. Part I is here.

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello

With the fall of monasticism, Christianity became largely an intellectual exercise.

The Fall of Monasticism and the Rise of Clerical Managerialism

Monasteries are built to last not for decades or even centuries, but for millennia. A monastery is meant to remain there and make that place holy, and that is the reason why monasteries were so successful in the creation of Christendom. But consecrated life, or what the Church calls ‘religious life’—that is, life lived under special vows—underwent big changes. Those changes came about due to the adaptation of religious life in the face of moments of crisis. But in the long run, such changes probably had unhelpful consequences. The consequences to which I refer slowly changed the Christian Faith from the permanent form of a concrete and settled way of life, to a set of intangible ideas or propositions which one either agreed with or one did not. 

Historically, the first dramatic change, it seems to me, was the rise of the friars. The first friar orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, founded by their namesakes at around the same time in the 13th century, arose in response to the re-emergence of Manichaean sects throughout Europe. These sects were gnostic, disruptive, and spreading fast. In response, wandering monks—friars—appeared, and they began to win back the people.

The appearance of the friars marked a revolutionary change in which these new ‘monks’—free from the vow of stability—no longer remained in monasteries. They did not stay in one place to transform the area in which they’d settled, consecrating it down the centuries. These friars were on the move, wandering and preaching, turning up in cities and then disappearing again years later. They established lasting priories, but the friars moved between those priories constantly. The friars were to have no lasting attachment to a particular place and its surrounding landscape. What is more, rather than seeing this change in the Church as an unfortunate innovation necessitated by a passing crisis, new celebrity friars—including someone as influential as St. Thomas Aquinas—argued that their way of life marked the perfection of all religious life, combining as it did both contemplative and apostolic life, whereas monks were ‘disadvantaged’ by being contemplatives alone, so Aquinas argued.

By this change in the conception of a ‘consecrated person,’ the Church was set on a trajectory that ultimately unwound its mission centuries later. The friars were not farmers, artisans, and traders; they were full-time missionaries. They would come, render the faithful orthodox with their preaching, and leave. In this way, the definition of the Christian tacitly changed from a ‘liturgical person’ to a ‘person who accepts certain propositions.’ The Faith, without anyone noticing, slowly changed from the existential transfiguration of human nature and the ongoing transformation of human culture to a set of formulae requiring assent. In short, the threads of rationalism, which would later deconstruct the Church and her mission, were sewn into her most holy organ, namely the consecrated life of her religious orders. 

The Church was now set on a course from which she never swerved: the role of monastic life slowly diminished in its importance and in its presence in the Western Church. The Council of Trent in the 16th century, addressing the crisis of the Protestant Reformation, doubled down on the notion that the Christian religion is in essence a catechetical enterprise. The rise of the friars had set the Church on the path of clericalizing religious life, and now, with the emergence of Protestantism and the opening up of the New World, it was believed that an even newer kind of religious life was needed. In turn, beginning with St. Ignatius of Loyola and his rather novel—and in the long run, disastrous—conception of religious obedience, the notion of a ‘clerical order’ appeared, soon being replicated in other orders, such as the Redemptorists and the Passionists.

Ido not see in these developments some deliberate conspiracy against monastic life in the West, and neither do I think that the founders of these orders were not true saints. Indeed, I have a deep affection for St. Francis of Assisi in particular, whose life and charism I have argued elsewhere ought to be taken as a special example in our own epoch for how to rebuild the Church. The rise of the friars and then the clerical institutes undoubtedly responded to genuine crises and achieved astonishing successes in a short amount of time. Nonetheless, with these innovations, the Church over time lost something, perhaps its noblest treasure; it lost its sense of the privileged place of monasticism in the establishment of Christian societies. And so too, slowly, the entire Church moved from a monastic culture to a clerical culture, and hence from a consecrated culture to a managerial culture, the consequences of which have not been good to say the least.

That great authority on monasticism, St. John Cassian, who so influenced St. Benedict, had been profoundly worried by the prospect of any clericalization of religious life. Indeed, Cassian wrote that when a bishop visited a monastery, the unordained members should literally hide themselves out of sight to avoid being ordained by the bishop during his visit. Thus, in his Rule, St. Benedict insisted that priesthood would have nothing to do with a monk’s station in the hierarchy of the monastery. The Benedictine monastery was not to be a clerical institute but a community of Christian brothers under vows and a common rule. Today, however, the clericalization of religious life has so infected the Western Church that if you visit any Benedictine, Cistercian, or Trappist monastery, you will invariably find that all the monks are either priests or undergoing training for priesthood. And the notion that a lay brother of a monastery could become, say, an abbot is unthinkable. Undoubtedly St. Benedict—himself a lay brother who was never ordained—would have been deeply unimpressed. 

With this clericalization of religious life, the orders of consecrated Christians were increasingly deemed mere extensions of the priestly hierarchy. These orders, however, had largely been founded on the initiatives of unmarried lay people. But gradually the Church’s members forgot this. And by the time of the Second Vatican Council, a new ecclesiology had appeared in which it was held that there were now three states in the Church: the priesthood, laity, and religious. This is obviously false. Traditionally, the Church’s constitution was deemed not tripartite, but bipartite, on the model of the incarnation itself, of which the Church is the mystical extension and perpetuation. It was understood that there were two states ordinary to the Christian life, namely clerical and lay, corresponding to the divine nature and sacred humanity of the one person of Jesus Christ. 

This, if you like, is the horizontal dualism of the Church: two states, clerical and lay, ordinary to Christians. These states had different roles; put crudely, the clerics were to sanctify the laity and the laity were to sanctify the world. Out of the ordinary states, however, Christians—clerical or lay—could be called into an extraordinary way of life properly called ‘religious,’ in which one enters the supernatural spousal condition of consecration. Thus, the Church’s traditional ecclesiology recognised two sets of two states, horizontal and vertical: clerical and lay, and secular and religious. Secular Christians can be clerical or lay, and religious Christians can be clerical or lay. And religious orders may have consecrated or secular members, the former having taken vows and the latter being lay people or secular clergy—like diocesan priests, for example—who are traditionally called ‘tertiaries’ or ‘oblates.’

So, in the Church’s traditional ecclesiology, members of either of the two ordinary states might be consecrated, having taken vows of religion, but by so doing they do not cease to be clerical or lay. But after the ‘new Pentecost’ of the Second Vatican Council, consecration in religious life wasn’t considered something that belonged to an extraordinary calling which could be offered by Christ to any Christian, clerical or lay, but rather it was judged another state altogether. The bipartite Christological constitution of the Church was done away with. And once we lost a sense of religious life as something distinct, as belonging to an extraordinary calling, we then started commonly using ‘vocation’ to refer to any life choice. The notion of the special supernatural spousal calling of religious life—something extraordinary, not ordinary, to the baptised—evaporated.

With the inflated role of the bishop as a kind of corporate manager on steroids, advocated by the Council’s bad ecclesiology, the consecrated religious were then seen as pseudo-clerical bodies totally under the management of the hierarchy. Given that most male religious members were ordained anyway, it was difficult to see how they might assert the autonomy of their consecrated religious life. At present, those non-consecrated members of orders—traditionally known as ‘oblates’ or ‘tertiaries,’ who are either single or married lay people or secular clergy—are routinely erroneously called ‘lay members’ of orders. (It’s especially difficult to see how diocesan clergy who are tertiary members of orders are ‘lay members.’) 

This may all seem beside the point, but the implication is that all the un-ordained consecrated male members as well as the nuns are not ‘lay members.’ So, what are they? Well, in the eyes of Rome, they appear to be considered sort of ‘half-clerics.’ So confused is modern Catholic ecclesiology that no one seems to notice that none of this makes sense. The effect, though, is that all monks, friars, and nuns—all who are not so-called ‘lay members’—are now deemed mere extensions of the hierarchy and treated as such. In turn, Rome routinely interferes with their constitutions, absolves members of their vows, and usurps their properties. And most members of most orders are so clericalized that they do not see this as a problem, or an abuse of power. The entire situation would be laughable if it were not blatantly sacrilegious.

Through this process of clericalization, monasticism waned in the West. The orders of friars and the clerical institutes grew far more numerous, and there also grew an ecclesiastical culture of privileging the secular priesthood of the dioceses. In short, the whole Church grew clerical, and the word ‘Church’ itself largely became identified with the priesthood alone (despite the fact that priests made up a tiny percentage of the Church’s overall faithful, and still do). 

It took centuries of secular ideology and intense coercion to make Europe apostatise, and secularisation was achieved with such difficulty largely because the powers of Satan that gained power in modernity had to battle against the very essence of the Old Continent itself, an essence begotten by the mystic veil of monastic life that was draped over it for millennia. On the other hand, it takes a Pentecostal preacher one day in a South American town to have the whole of its population abandon their Catholic faith and adopt his religion. Why? Because South America was evangelised by friars and clerics who came, preached, and went. Hence, the evangelisation was skin-deep, whereas what the new world needed was an evangelisation that reached the heart, that is, the kind of evangelisation that comes from centuries of monasticism.

Rather than an ongoing, settled, stable way of life, Christianity became largely an intellectual exercise, which at the most plebeian level amounted to the learning of certain prayers and the memorisation of abbreviated catechisms. Sacred place gave way to sacred idea, and the life of grace morphed into something analogous to ideology (Catholicism could never have so successfully adapted to become an internet genre, which is almost solely what it is now, without this corruption of its mission into abstractions.) Still, at least prior to the Second Vatican Council, parish priests had canonical rights to remain at their parishes throughout their lives, which even through the clericalization of the Church allowed for some stability in the practice of religion. This right, however, was abolished with the new conception of bishops as all-powerful ecclesiastical managers which arose with the fashionable episcopal theology of that Council.

A major aspect of this development was the class transformation of European society, which in turn changed the class dynamic of the Church. In the Middle Ages, it was landed aristocracy that populated monasteries just as much as the peasantry, two social classes characterised by a loyalty to place and locality. But as the bourgeois class swelled down the centuries, its members—who were characterised by their attachment not to place but to commerce, and possessed a managerial mentality rather than one formed by noblesse oblige—began slowly to populate the Church. In late modernity, the Church’s supreme office, the papacy, got its first middle-class pope, when hitherto this office had been occupied by nobles and peasants alone. 

Pope Paul VI had all the characteristics of a middle-class manager. He was a social climber with a sympathy for tabula rasa ways of governing. Just as the bourgeoisie, with their privileging of ideas over realities—and their pathological impulse, rooted in rationalism, to conform the latter to the former—had overseen every modern revolution, so too Pope Paul oversaw an analogous revolution in the Church. He reduced the sacred liturgy from a mystical conduit of grace expressed in a sacred language to a vernacularised, didactic exercise to entertain a new, educated population. 

In times of political revolution, typically a bourgeois progressive takes control, calls into question the organicism of the polity, and then claims to create a new nation altogether out of a paper constitution, which he then enforces through a network of similarly bourgeois, servile collaborators. So, too, the same model unfolded in the Church of the 1960s. With the Council that John XXIII had left him, Pope Paul oversaw the creation of a new ecclesiology from new non-dogmatic documents, for a new Church with a new liturgical culture, all born from a ‘new Pentecost.’ Since then, the Church has continued to recruit the most unremarkable, bourgeois managers into its clerical ranks, and by so doing her culture has completely changed—by which I mean nothing complimentary.

To this day, the monastic and contemplative life is routinely attacked by those at the highest echelons of the Church, and a mediocre episcopal caste of stale administrators oversees decline whilst recurrently insisting that some new catechetical programme will solve the problem of the widespread crisis in faith-induction and faith-retention. Ideas, always ideas, will get us out of the crisis, so they think. I am not convinced, of course, that they really see the apostasy of the Church’s members as a crisis at all.

What these ecclesiastical managers will certainly not do is acknowledge the signs of life that actually exist in the Church. I am afraid to mention any examples by name, given that the Eye of Sauron in Rome is ever scanning the panorama of the Church for any such signs of life which, on seeing, it immediately sends orcs to destroy. I will say, though, that there is at this time a monastery in Italy where the monks strive for holiness under the Rule of their holy father St. Benedict. Those monks offer the ancient liturgy and chant the psalms in their rite’s sacred language. Remarkable numbers of devoted faithful attend their liturgies. Many, many families and individuals have moved to live near the monastery. Others travel from all around the world to visit the monastery, some travelling once or twice per year to pray there and be blessed by this otherwise forgotten part of the peninsula.

Those monks at the Italian monastery saw something that others have not. They saw that what we needed in the modern age was not a new and very different St. Benedict, but more likely an old and very similar St. Benedict. We needed the Christian religion not understood as a catechetical exercise, but as the ongoing, incremental transfiguration of nature by grace. Now, before anyone accuses me of denying that the faith is propositional, let me be clear that I believe that the Christian faith requires assent to propositions of divine revelation just as I believe that friendship requires belief in truths about one’s friend. Given that the reception of grace moves one from enmity with God to friendship with God (James 4:4), the analogy isn’t an inappropriate one. But if one were to think that friendship consisted solely of accepting propositions about one’s friend, rather than merely presupposing the acceptance of such propositions, one would have misunderstood what friendship is. Friendship is something lived and stable, and this is infinitely more the case in reference to friendship with God. And it is that lived and stable friendship with God that is proper to all Christians that monasticism presents to the world in concrete form.

There is a widespread assumption among Christians today that if you get a person to accept certain Christian propositions, he will live as a Christian. In this way, we are all Protestants now. This assumption, of course, is undergirded by a typically rationalistic attribution to ideas of a causal power that they do not actually possess. It is of course true, if I may put it Hermetically, that esoteric transformation is prerequired by exoteric transformation. But the reverse is true as well, for these are correlated transformations. ‘As above, so below,’ as the maxim of the Emerald Tablet goes. For example, it is obviously true to say that you cannot have peace in your marriage until you have peace in your heart, but it is equally true that you cannot have peace in your heart if you do not have peace in your marriage. And if the obviousness of this observation is not immediately clear to you, then you are likely severely under the spell of rationalism. What monasticism achieved in the formation of our Christian civilisation was the establishment of Christianity not as a set of abstract ideas over which we could argue on Twitter, but the infusion of every aspect of daily life by Redemption as living truth.

We must recover the existentiality of Christianity. And for this reason, I am quite sure, if the future will see any renewal and revival of the Church—and hence of our civilisation—it will be by the Church resituating monasticism at the heart of its life and its mission, and treasuring it as such. It is this rediscovery of the role of monasticism in the Church as the foremost antidote to the Church’s ills that I will explore in the next and final part of this three-part essay.