Saint Benedict was born about 480 AD. in Norcia, in today’s Italy, about 75 miles north of Rome. Our chief source of information about Benedict’s life is from “the Dialogues”, a late sixth century work by Pope St. Gregory the Great. Though the Dialogues are not “history” as we know it, they do give us some details about Benedict. Benedict was from a noble family and as a young man was sent to study in Rome. He was disgusted by the moral decadence he found there and so set off at the age of twenty for Enfide, a village thirty miles to the east of Rome. Later he travelled to the mountainous region of Subiaco where he lived in the solitude for three years. St. Gregory’s Dialogues illustrate in stories the key aspects of Benedict’s personality. The beginnings of Benedict’s monastic life depict a young man who grows in spiritual maturity through a series of confrontations with temptation. Benedict emerges from these struggles, a victorious “Man of God” whose goodness becomes well known even from the isolation of his hermitage.
Benedict started twelve small communities of monks in the vicinity of Subiaco, before traveling fifty miles to the south to form a large monastic community, the famous Monte Cassino. Here he wrote “the Rule” for which he is known and revered throughout the world. Benedict died at Monte Cassino about 547 AD. His spirit, however, lives on in the lives of the men and women who have dedicated themselves to the following of his rule of life, to life in monastic community, to “prayer, study and work”, and to the search for God.