For an outline, we can continue to use that brief article by Fr Giovanni in the New Catholic Encyclopedia. I think you have a copy of it. We'll run through the rest of the history, we've got up to about 1500, and then turn around and take a look at the whole thing briefly from the point of view of the history of the Church, its framework, its context. And then we'll go on to the article of Thomas Merton, in which he tries to summarize the present situation. So, we've got down about as far as this, on the right-hand page there, at the bottom of the column, right-hand column, on 1096. Effective reform was not realized, however, until the following century, when the congregation of Camaldoli and San Michele di Murano in Venice was formed. Now, this is a very complicated history. If you've looked at those notes that I made from Pagnani's book, the notes on the Camaldoli's

[01:07]

regime, you'll see there's quite a bit of detail about this period. This falls into Pagnani's third period, extending from 1407 to 1616. It begins on page 2 of those 9 or 10 pages of notes. Period 3, 1407 to 1616, from the autonomy of the monastery of San Michele di Murano in Venice, up to the split between the hermits and the synagogues. They got their own abbot in 1470. Now, we have to refer to these notes to get a little more detail on their history. Note that there are two polarities. There's more than one thing going on here. It seems at one point like all of the tension is between the Cenobites and the hermits, and there's plenty of that. But something else is going on too, which is a tension between two, not quite two nationalities, but two different kinds of people, and two political centers, Venice and France particularly.

[02:15]

So, as Pagnani points out, the monasteries were taken under the protection of powerful nobles, and hence they would tend to line up under the wings of their respective patrons. And if there's tension and competition between France and Venice, then there's going to be a similar polarization between monasteries. So there's a lot more than... Besides, Italy is a strange place because of the mixture of nationalities, there's a mixture of groups that have come in there and stayed there. And so you'll even have different racial mixtures and so on involved in these things. Northern Italians and Central Italians. It's quite complex. Let's take a look at those notes of Pagnani, starting on page two, towards the bottom, and just skim through them, skimming off the things that are more important, because there's a lot of unimportant detail there, about how often they had a general chaplain, how often they elected a general, and so on.

[03:16]

Some things don't seem important, but they are signs of something. When they start re-electing a general every year, instead of having him for life, some things happen. Okay, here's the regime. Now, those page numbers are from Pagnani's Italian book, which somebody wrote to transcript. I'll wait about a time, it's not difficult. Head of all the commanders, Hermit Senebrightson, who was a prior general. He could be either a Senebrightson, Hermit was chosen by the general chapter, confirmed by the Pope, his government was for life up until 1513. And then you have this Pietro Delfino in office, who reigned, and really reigned, from 1480 until 1525. That's 45 years, that's a long time for anybody. And so he was re-elected, and he repeated it even after 1513 until his death. And there was a lot of movement to get him out.

[04:17]

So Giustiniani, that whole reform format of Giustiniani, part of it was to get Delfino out of office. Quite a touching story, though, because he accepted this great Venetian into his hermitage a little while ago. You saw it, a little while after you saw it, because he was from Boston. Because he felt that he was sort of the, what do you call it, that all of the dead wood depended on him, you see. Because he had been a great humanist, and he had broadened things, and his links with powerful people, the way that he let the cenobitical life interfere with the life of the hermitage, that's the thing that caught Giustiniani. And the acts of aggression on the part of the cenobit towards the hermit. If you read Giustiniani's book, the cleric's book on Giustiniani, you'll see all that. I'll go into a little more detail about that. The cleric is very much on the side of the hermitage.

[05:19]

Probably if you were to read it from Giustiniani's point of view, it would be a different story. That's right. These things are really emotional, emotional politics, emotional challenge. And we've got to ask ourselves in the end why that is. How did we get into this crazy situation in history, where people who should be coexisting peacefully, helping one another, nourishing one another, that's why they have one another, one another's throats. It's not always that way, because when we read about external history, it's just like the history of the world, what do you read about? You read about wars, you read about political events, don't you? And similarly, these notes here are the notes about the regime. Now the life is invisible. You see, the positive life and the goodness and the fruits that are being born are invisible. All you see is organizational changes. Organizational changes consist very often of breaks or divisions or of tensions and things like that.

[06:24]

So it really doesn't give you an accurate idea of what's going on, unfortunately. Neither does the history of the world, indeed. Because you read about political events, and very often they're wars, or there's who is in power. They're power, really. It's a history of power, which is not a history of life. It's very difficult to hear the history of life. It takes real depth to hear the history of life. Because life moves along silently, doesn't it? Just like the garden grows silently. But the events that you read about in history are the ones that make a lot of noise. And those are very often violent events, or very extreme events. Okay. That's right. Also, the disturbance has to do with what's going on underneath. It certainly indicates the disturbances, you think, and so on. Now, the trouble is that it's a one-sided indication, often, of what's going on underneath.

[07:32]

Often, all that speaks is the violence. And the peace is silent, and the violence speaks, or the violence makes noise. So it does signify something that's going on underneath, but it doesn't give you a proportion, it doesn't give you a fair idea. Yes, that's right. That's right, that's right. Pay attention to it, at least on a certain level. There may have been a lot of monks there that were going along very quietly, paying attention to God, but we don't find much of that, except insofar as they've written things elsewhere. That's not the history that we have here. That's right. See, a lot of this is like the breaking of an eggshell. Remember when Abraham and Lot, they both got rich, and they couldn't live together anymore? So Abraham says to Lot, you go your way, and I'll go mine. So that's not negative, really, that's just inevitable. Like a son separating from his parents.

[08:33]

So we shouldn't see it all that way. But that's what we have, is this kind of history, and that's what we have to deal with. It would take a historian of depth, you see, to bring out what's really going on. Jedin? I don't remember. Which period was it? I don't know. You'd have to look at them one by one. Sometimes historians make generalizations that are really quite nice. Okay, and that's a generalization. Let's skim through here now, see what we can find. So they were going to have elections every three years.

[09:39]

When they begin pulling a tight rein on people, you see, they'll start having general chapters every year, and sometimes they re-elected, imagine, they re-elected all of the prelates, all of the abbots and priors and the prior general every year, so they couldn't get entrenched. It's a whole different kind of organization when you do that. You see how far that is from the whole idea of spiritual fatherhood? Well, they didn't consider themselves that benedictine at that point. They had their own organization, as you can see here, and it had a certain centralization to it. You see how it was all centralized at Kamaldi at the beginning? Because it started out as a reform and therefore everything was subjected to the head, which was Kamaldi. And then later on you have San Michele di Marano and two heads. And then later on you'll have seven or nine or twelve heads, and they have what they call as loci, or places. And that's a reform effort in which a bunch of monasteries are submitted, subjected to one powerful monastery, you see.

[10:41]

So that's different from the original benedictine structure, but even the benedictines did that. And part of this reform effort of Kamaldi is patterned on the benedictine reform of Santa Justina di Carlo as reform. And that's right on the outskirts of Venice. And so you begin to see the connections along around 1500 of what was going on. Justiniani and his friends were Venetians. The authority of the general, the prior general in the past had been almost unlimited, but with time it became always more moderated. Now it was limited by the general chapter, the Diet, the conventional chapter of the Holy Hermitage, and the two visitors. And he says the word visitor shouldn't confuse you, because actually they're standing very close to the general, sort of holding his arms behind his head at a certain point. They are not in that position now? They're in that position in a moderated way. In other words, if you read the constitution, you'll find that the general can do certain things by himself.

[11:42]

He can do certain things only when he informs or consults with the council of the two visitors, and some things he can only do with the approval of the two visitors. And that means that he has to have a majority of the three of them, because it's kind of fun to take a vote. That's the way it is. So there's still a control, there's an anchor on the general. No, no, they're elected by the general chapter. You see how it's carefully designed? Because Delfino is a general, who in his 45 years played a rather large hand sometimes. To pick up inferiority. The greatest authority rested in the general chapter. Every three years, the Diet, our minor chapter, which is now known as the Consultant. You know, there's a surprising consistency in this theoretical structure. You would expect that we have a modernized structure. That was basically the same. The same as it always was for 500, 600 years. So what was the Diet is now the Consultant,

[12:46]

and it's held in the three years in between general chapters. Capitular fathers, that means the ones who attend the chapter, the adventurers, delegates, the deputies. And they elected a definitorium of nine members. A lot of conclusions still do that. You have a more wieldable body, you see, because otherwise you have too many. And then they do the real deliberating. It's like a senate, or a more select group of elders. But if you have a small congregation, you don't have to do that. We don't have to do that now, because in our general chapter we have only about 15 people. You can get to more than one table. There being some houses of little importance and almost empty at once, now we're around 1,500. Well, nearly 1,500. It was necessary to join them to monasteries completely formed. Therefore they split them up into groups and centralized them, organized them, sort of lumped them together.

[13:46]

And the history of all these changes. You can see that the Holy See was very much concerned with the congregation, because being in Italy and being a very important monastic congregation and being close to the center of the Holy See, right under the nose. No, no. But the abbesses, however, attend the first part of the general chapter, by invitation, and then they withdraw before the official voting starts. So there's a first part which is open, and they get a message of it, and they can speak to it. But afterwards, you see, the general chapter doesn't govern the nuns, and so they can't participate in it fully, and they don't have yet a congregation of their own. Well, those deputies, you see, were no doubt the chaplains of the nuns. They must have had contact with the nuns.

[14:50]

Either that, or they were monks that were chosen by the nuns from those that they knew to represent them. They had to be men. And these four provinces, it's the same scheme. Now, the congregation of San Michele, St. Michael di Marano, down towards the bottom. They had this chapter in 1444, to reorganize the Camalbi's congregation on the model of the recently formed congregation of San Giustino, the Monte Cassino. Now, you remember that that was the big Benedictine reformation after that period of decadence of the 14th and 15th century. San Giustino. So the Camalbi's themselves had grown decadent, and so they said, well, you get your act together in the same way that we've done this reform in northern Italy. Amparo. Amparo is near Venice. So you can see a certain contagion here. He had hoped to model the reform of the whole Benedictine order on them.

[15:52]

Remember the reform of Benedictine on the island. Ninth century or so, similar hope. Now, they had a general imposed upon them in 1439. His name was Gomez. It sounds very Spanish, doesn't it? I haven't looked up his name. There were a lot of interventions on this. And he came from that congregation, so the idea was for him to put the Camalbi's into the same congregation, in this division into the nine loci or places. Locus means place, of course. All these things largely dissolved as unions into groups, and so it wasn't much of a congregation. Now, in 1474, the Venetian government began a congregation of the Venetian monasteries. Notice the political interference here.

[16:57]

The San Michele, San Mattia, Santa Maria della Cattura, and Padovice Hills. Do you have any questions? Sure, yeah. The desire to be independent from Camalbi? The desire to be independent from Camalbi, certainly. What kind of jealousy or rival would be with Camalbi? For instance, if the monastery in Venice is really more vigorous than that at Camalbi, they can greatly resent being under Camalbi. It's a typical thing of a young community growing up and resenting being under an older community. Okay, so 4th of July. So then they had this congregation of San Michele on a sensitive basis. The elected prelates in this congregation don't need any confirmation from Camalbi,

[18:01]

it seems to be independent, and yet there's still some participation. And later on. The Venetians still recognized the prior general as superior before the Camalbis, and their own head was called simply vicar. But this was only a nominal concession, platonic. There were really two congregations distinct and always more antagonistic, Venice and San Michele and the Camalbi. Then they tried this union in 1513, and this was at the instigation of Giustiniani and his friends, who were Venetians. Now, this being so, and since Giustiniani was at Camalbi, he didn't want to see Camalbi separate from Venice, I suppose. I don't know all the reasons that were in there. It's a little surprising because remember that Giustiniani also was the pioneer of the Hermits. What he wanted really was the freedom of the Hermitage. And therefore, I don't know why he would want to keep the link with this Venetian, Venetian cenobitical congregation, except maybe to use its influence also in the Hermitage of Camalbi.

[19:02]

And he probably felt that was more healthy than the cenobitical part of Camalbi itself. New congregation of the Holy Hermitage, Sacro Eremo and of St. Michael of Marama. But the title itself was unfortunate because it put them both on the same level. There's no age. Seventeen groups of houses. Now, you see, there are a lot of houses concerned, 82 in all. The prior general is elected every year. At that point, you see, the prior general at that point is only a kind of administrative figure. You see what I mean? He can't really change anything or do anything. All he can do is enforce the observance. The power of initiative is taken away from him. Or at least there's such a check on him. He always needs to be extremely careful. He's on a short leash. Where is that mentioned in the notes?

[20:06]

Okay. Something is... All of men, many of these had only a few months. I don't know. Oh, yes. I see. I don't know to what extent there was a real authority or relationship there. It's probably just the way it was up above, that they wouldn't quite govern the nuns, but the nuns would be represented, you know, something like that. I think it was a loose thing. They were never really completely built into the congregation, I don't think. Because they were never really completely united among themselves. But they had a more clear representation and link there than they did at some later times. There probably could be more of them, too. Okay, Leo X, just anyhow, he was a friend of his.

[21:11]

It's always handy to have a pope as your friend. So he enforced the act of that general chapter as a papal decree. But it still wasn't enough. So you find just... He was trying to reform the order. You find just anyhow, after a little while, the leading come out of it, the Phantom of Congregation. Now, we have quite a bit of detail on all of that, but not much of it is in English. We owe it to John Leclerc, who wrote two books on Justiniani. The one that you probably know is Alone with God, which is an anthology of Justiniani's writings on the Hanukkah, with a preface by Thomas Frank and an introduction by Leclerc. The other one is called Blessed Paul Justiniani. And it's not an anthology, but it's Leclerc writing as a historian and writing about the whole history of that time. Justiniani is the central figure. A Humanist Hermit is the title of it. No, it's French.

[22:13]

Leclerc had written a book earlier, a bigger book, quite a marvelous book, on Peter Damian, also in French, called Hermit and Man in the Church. So he likes to pick hermit figures and then to show the wider radius of their personality, of their influence or whatever. So he did that with both of them. And he never did it with St. Ronald, maybe because there's not enough known about St. Ronald. Both of these men are writers, you see. And this history centers around 1520 or so. Justiniani's years of 1476 to 1528 when he died. And he went to Connaughtley in 1510. In 1513, he was already bringing about this general chapter. And then through his influence with the Pope, you see, he got the whole congregation. You wonder how much chance the Holy Spirit has to impact him at a time like that.

[23:16]

Things are happening so swiftly. Well, things had to happen most of the time. He left Connaughtley, I believe, in 1520. And then he started his own community, which multiplied and became quite a large congregation, and which still exists as a congregation behind St. Ronald Connaughtley. But he left in 1520. He wrote several constitutions. He wrote three editions of their medical rules. The first one at Connaughtley still, and the other two later on. Oh, yes, sure, their disciples. In fact, they called themselves the Company of St. Ronald at a certain point. In fact, the idea was, in Giustiniani's mind, to return to the pure tradition of... Yes, it's a reformation, but at the same time, you see, he chopped off part of the tradition, which was the same biblical part. And La Carca is completely on his side. He says he had to do that, because what he was fighting for was the freedom

[24:18]

of the hermitage, the freedom of the solitary life. Our general has contested that. See, a lot of water had gone under the dam. We had this whole thing of St. Michele and Connaughtley and so on. Do you remember, at an earlier point, it said the general will be elected from among the Cenobites and hermits. And he didn't have to live in a hermitage. He didn't. I remember way back when they put him in Fianza, at San Hippolytus. They put the general in another residence. And take, for instance, Pietro Delfino. He wasn't any... And that was one of the things that Giustiniani was angry about, was that Delfino was so much of a... something of a man of the world. I guess he was a good man. Do you see the state today in hermitage

[25:22]

and their impact on the hermitage? That allows the men not to be able to go to that hermitage and not live in it. So the superior would be hermiting to get into that hermitage? Yeah, yeah. So you could see a... Well, if you've got ten monasteries and one hermitage and the superior is a hermit, you can see how there's going to be tension. And that was the situation at a certain point. But it's a kind of unstable combination no matter what you do about it. If one... See, if these two institutions are tied together in such a way that one has to be subjected to the other, there's no... You can never win, you can never succeed. It's not right for monasteries to be subjected to some kind of hermitical discipline by a superior who is sort of using them to support an hermitical life. And it's not right for the hermitage to be subjected to a majority of cenobitical communities, you see.

[26:24]

Which is what happens usually. And the cenobites are more powerful, aren't they? If we try to get really to the root of this trouble, I've been thinking about it. I think the paradox goes very deep. And it lined up for me something like this. I'm thinking about it this morning. You've got this fundamental paradox built into Christianity. And Christianity is supposed to be the liberation of the human race. Now, if you look at what Jesus is, when he comes in and gives a sermon, he doesn't look like people from the Hebrew religion. So, the word of God, or the Jewish institution, has kind of turned into this kind of music, these bars, by the time he comes along as well. Now, his... His movement, the movement of Jesus, is a movement of reparation. It's not just that kind of movement. Now, monasticism is supposed to be the same thing. When you get a church that's married into a kind of closed institution, maybe not just juridically,

[27:26]

but also because it becomes somehow fused with the secular powers, right? So it becomes a closed world. Monasticism goes out of that, into the desert, in order to recapture the original liberty of Christianity. But then, monasticism itself, monasticism itself, after a while, gets organized, and it's wedded to the world. It's wedded to the world economically, socially, and then legally, juridically, so that it becomes a system of laws. Okay? It comes down into its own structure. Economic structure, and then political structure. And then, the solitary life, once again, has to emerge. It's liberation. But then, the solitary life, becomes subjected to the same thing. In fact, if it's put inside the juridical thing, it gets tied into the same box, rather, with the monastic structure, with the cenobitic life, and so you just go over and over and over.

[28:27]

And so, in the end, you end up with a paradox that this terrorism of freedom, which the solitary life is supposed to be, is fighting for its life inside some kind of box, in some kind of polarized situation, against another form of life, in a closed system. And it should never be a closed system. You've got this thing, where the two of us are somehow playing against one another, inside the box. Yes? The paradox, the paradox of solitary life, is within the church, right in the heart of the church, but it's also on the margins of the church. It's on the margins of the church, which means that it's the charism of freedom that's centered on the margins. The charism of freedom in the church is supposed to be rediscovered

[29:28]

on this margin, which is a monastic life, which is in itself solitary. But then, in the church, it is in a political form. It has that interpretation. And then, this gets locked into the center again, which is the wall around it, the margin of life, takes, for example, inclusion, I take it so, which is a form of freedom, which becomes the most severely limited form, politically, as well, because it's locked into Islam itself. Maybe that's got to happen, but we'll see what happens. This is the paradox of colonialism. Where should be freedom turns out to be the most severely restricted form. And so, we're always coming into this paradox between structured or external form and the kind of material and social and political and legal limitations and the charism of freedom. The charism of freedom is always finding itself somehow turned inside out. It's one way of looking at it. A very deliberately paradoxical way of looking at it.

[30:29]

Because the hermit life is supposed to be a life of freedom, a life of spiritual freedom. And when it ends up fighting somebody else for power, in order not to be put under somebody else's thumb, there's something wrong. It happens all the time. It's already a paradox when the solitary life becomes built into a structure in that way. There's one way in which you can see the sanyasi life in India as being, maybe, what do you call it, a simpler expression of that freedom which has less of that danger, perhaps. It doesn't. But the context is totally different over there. It's not a juridically organized religious institution. Conventionally. In general chapter. By the sanyasi general. It's a good thing to think about, though,

[31:35]

is that struggle that's continually going on in the church between what the church is supposed to be in its heart, what it is in its heart. And in these obvious paradoxes, when we see people pushing and pulling against one another. Well, very often, you see, I say in some way, yes, but very often the terrorism is not looked at in terms of freedom. Maybe looked at in terms of observance, virtue, or keeping the rule, frequently intended to migrate. But the Senebites, OK, look at it this way. The Senebites, living their life with its kind of openness and breadth, that's their freedom, OK? And they'll fight for that. Whereas the Hermit, for him, freedom is in solitude,

[32:36]

which means that he somehow finds that openness and that very freedom of the Senebite hostile to himself, very easily, OK? At least that's the way it turns out. So you'll get the Hermits pulling for strictness and for observance, not for freedom. And yet involved in that is their desire for the particular kind of freedom that they need. So it's deeply built into the paradox, because they're really fighting for two kinds of freedom very often. But also you get the other thing of both sides fighting for strictness. The Senebites wanting to pull the Hermits, perhaps, into a strict external regime, into some kind of cenobitical control. And at the same time, the Hermits wanting to pull the Senebites into a more austere monastic life, which they can recognize as being akin to their own. Because now it's... It's a different situation,

[33:41]

because neither side is the same as it was, and neither side is as vigorous as it was in another time. We don't sense ourselves as being so much inside a box, for instance. And yet there is a tension. Right now we're in a position... I won't play the generalist, because I wouldn't want to say silly things. I wouldn't play that. Right now we're in a position where the pieces are shifting very rapidly. Well, that's what we're doing this for, actually. So at the end we can say, can we identify any curves? As we look back at that, can we see any shapes, forms, curves, which enable us to locate ourselves now and see which way things are going, okay?

[34:42]

Or which way they should go, perhaps. That's what we really want to do. It's a collective question. You do. But I think the collective lesson, in a sense, is first. It's like getting the map of a certain countryside, and then as an individual you can decide where you want to go, okay? But the map is a collective, at least when we talk about history. Let's go on with this so we don't have anything left over next time, any crumbs to pick up next time. We'll start afresh, as if this is all... never happened. Okay, we're down to the congregation of St. Michael de Marano. The Reform and the Imitation of St. Justina di Padua. I had some notion that Padua was in the north of Italy, and lo and behold, I looked today, and it's quite near Venice, so we'll see. The Union of 1513.

[35:50]

Now, this was a big point in Comaldi's history, because... and remember here, what's happening in the background. This is the time of the Reformation, the time of Luther, the time of the second split in the Church. Now, there's obviously some kind of turn of destiny behind all this, that the Comaldi should be born at the time of the first division of the Churches, and that their own great upheaval should occur at the time of the second division of the Churches. Born at the time of the split between East and West, and they themselves going back to this Eastern survival, which is the hermetical life in the Lavra, and then their own split, their polarization and their internal split happening at the time of the split of the Western Church, the Protestant Reformation, and resulting in this permanent polarization between hermitage and synagogue. We can only guess that the underlying causes... There seems to be an instability in the Western tradition at a certain point,

[36:51]

and things just start flying apart, whether it be Northern Christianity in Europe and Southern European Christianity, or whether it be hermitage and synagogue, or whether it be liturgy and spirituality, or whether it be the vernacular language and the sort of common piety, and the more learned clerical Latin, all those things. The mixture is unstable at a certain point. The vision of the universe is lost. And this has to happen in some way, but it's awful why that happens. And today we're at a point where we can see a lot of it. We can see a lot of the elements, and it's as if we're being called to the effectibility. Not quite in the same way as at the beginning. Yes. Well, that's precisely the thing. There's a phase of mad blindness when everybody thinks that for him to exist,

[37:53]

the other guy has to not exist. That's where we're in the box. It's the two spheres in the box that we have to... Perhaps we're liberated from that. Part of it is, it's just the church being closed in upon itself the way it was, against the world. Anyhow, that's a whole big question, as you can see. Enough speculation, on with facts. I read a little of this history in the back of the clerk's book this morning about that chapter 15, 13, and what happens. He puts it all in kind of a one-sided way, because he's really waving the flag for Justiniani about winning the liberty of the hermitage. He's quoting a Carambles historian of the 18th century, Edward Baranchine. He quotes an expression that he employs many times

[38:57]

in his chronicle to characterize the work of Justiniani coinciding with those of Justiniani himself. The work of Justiniani has consisted in liberating the hermitage. To liberate the hermitage from the empris, this is what's at the aggressiveness, the predominance of the Cenobites, was necessary, as Justiniani says, to liberate it from the general for life, so the general for life was a strong cenobitical force, who himself lent himself to the domination of the Cenobites over the hermitage. It dealt less with a tyranny exercised by Peter Delfino himself, than an influence which he allowed through feebleness to the Cenobites opposed to the hermitage and to the hermitical life. Yeah, even opposed. They didn't say hermits. Ha! Well, the major change that he tried to accomplish

[40:02]

was to put the hermitage back into the driver's seat, but it didn't stay that way, and that's why he left. Yeah. Oh no, no, he only did that desperate thing once this failed. His idea was to restore the hermitage to its original predominance. The reform accomplished in 1513 by Quirini and Justiniani only tended to make the hermitage reacquire its rights and its independence, and, as Baron Cini says, in its freedom and its privileges. From the original, in the beginning, Pantebono, that's the monastery of Conadry, was supposed to depend from the hermitage and to come to the assistance of the hermits. In fact, the hermitage found itself subjected to Pantebono, the monastery. And so on and on. He can't do it.

[41:06]

It's like a medieval theory. Do you see something there from the feudal society? The idea of this hierarchy of states. Here you've got the state of a normal Christian, who's pretty much maybe wallowing in this. Then you've got the situation of the clergy amongst the hermits. So the hermits are some kind of elite category in the church, which may be true, but if you build it into a structure and subject other people to them, as you subject the people to the clerics, you see how unstable it is. Because the monk is not supposed to be that at all. See, maybe that could be so in Tibet or somewhere like that, but certainly not in Christianity. The monk's charism itself contradicts that position of power and of supremacy, okay? And so it's so unstable that it's bound to explode after a while, it keeps happening. I'd like to see the monastery in a humanized manner. Yeah. You can't build it into an institution, but that's what was done. Because it was created right in that field of time.

[42:08]

The time of those kind of hierarchies. It seems to me that that's got a lot to do with it. Besides just the complexity, the way that monasticism was woven into the economy, the social picture, the politics, and the law of the time. It was just too much for the solitary life to handle. It's a contradiction. Romeo didn't, but it happened soon after. Had he done his work way out in the boondocks somewhere, it might not have happened, but since he was a friend of emperors and was well-known, well-known by the Holy See and so on, and because his disciples, without him, had a sense of insecurity, I think, so they needed someone to protect them. Pretty soon they made themselves too much of a fortress. I have no idea. Yes. It can happen. It hasn't happened yet.

[43:22]

Okay. So much for the conventuals. Down here at the bottom of page four is something about the conventuals. I looked up in Taniani and found out, once again, who they are. I will read that to you. Your pleasure. Now, the Franciscans had conventuals, who were people who lived a kind of semi-community life, okay? Saint Benedict would have called them Sarabites, I think. The conventuals in the Camaldolese side, however, come from parish priests. You see, there were monks who had been given parishes where they were perhaps alone, or there'd be only two or three of them, and their life became very alienated from the monastic life, especially, of course, when they were a medical help, even when they were alone. What's more, there were benefices attached to these parishes, and they appropriated the benefices to themselves and sometimes to their relatives. So it's quite a little situation, after all.

[44:37]

They had observances which were more bland, as he says, than the other practices. Well, the Third Order was much more structured and according to Hoyle, I think, this sort of happened, and then afterwards it was given a name. The Third Order was done on purpose to incorporate lay people into the Order, okay? I'm sure they could overlap, but the conventuals... These Camaldolese conventuals, I think, were more disreputable than the Franciscan conventuals. The Franciscan conventuals are still in existing order. You see, they were never at least permanently suppressed. The Camaldolese conventuals were. They just appropriated that name. They're kind of fringe monks. No rule and no faculty of the superiors sanctioned or made legitimate this Teprecate Istitut Sfionikos. Lamentable. Lamentable. Those within the monks who were invested with parochial parish benefices,

[45:44]

that's what they've been doing for a long time. Now, you still have a kind of similar situation because there are some Camaldolese that have been out of parishes for a long time to get attached to the place. They've been over in Sardinia for about 20 years. And after a while, they don't feel like they can call them back. But they don't have a title of conventual anymore. There are some people that get so installed in a place you have to leave them there for their whole life, especially after they get to a certain age. They were abolished finally in 1569, but they treated them sometimes gently, sometimes tried to straighten them up. They always wake up and come back. They were not living in Popskola for a very long time. Okay. Probably the 14th and 15th century. When you find them really rampant,

[46:46]

it seems to be the 16th century. Let's see. From 1319, the general chapter had begun to concern itself with them. And they didn't want monks being alone out in isolated churches anymore. So it persisted for 250 years or so. Probably that's not long after the beginning. That's a hundred years after the beginning. Okay, the fourth period starts with this division between the Cenobites and the Hermits, the final division between the Cenobites and the Hermits. And he talks down at the bottom of page four about the other congregations. He says the movement of Justinian was not a division

[47:47]

because he didn't take anything away with him. And yet, they did not, he says, harm the vitality of the order, but rather increased it. It became a kind of competitive thinking system. During this period, the commanderly shake off the yoke of the commendatory abbots. However, they leave with them their shirts sometimes, as you can see. The monks sometimes would only leave the monastery and never go properly to commendate the abbots who did the rest. It was a real scourge. Now, the secession of the Hermits, as he puts it. This is funny because the other Giovanni's article says in 1616, the Cenobites seceded from the Hermits. Yeah, in the 17th century, the Cenobites separated themselves from the Hermits. The Cenobites, ten times more numerous than the Hermits,

[48:54]

had the prevalence in the decisions, you can imagine. So, Angelo Analfi, Abba Geno, he must have been a Hermit. He returned to the sacrament, suggested separation. In 1612, none of the Cenobites were elected. The Major was a superior to all the Hermits. There had been division in spirit ever since the rise of San Matteo. So, they sent an apostolic visitor. Those apostolic visitors sometimes have enormous power so they can determine the fate of a congregation. This happened again in 1935. He decreed their absolute and definitive separation from the Cenobites. The Major, the majority of the Holy Hermitage became the Supreme Head of the Hermits of the Tuscan Congregation. Now, this title remained until 1935. The Hermits of Tuscany, which was the antique trunk, you see,

[49:58]

of Cornaldo, it became very small at a certain point, almost extinct. The Cenobites remained with their Abba Geno. And then they tried to get them back together, but it didn't work. He's got a neat comment there. When they tried to get them together at one point, separation was complete once again. To avoid it would have sufficed one of the twelve grades, if you know what I'm saying. I think. Now, but it amused me in 1966, or whenever it was, that I wrote it down. Otherwise it doesn't belong in the juridical doings. Okay, divisions between the Hermits, or Tuscans and Montecaroni. Problems with all those things, or conflicts of interest as well. It must have been really something, because in 1672 the Pope forbade them

[51:01]

under very severe penalties to talk about Judaism. Now the Cenobites, over on page six. Now Pagnani is writing about them as his own congregation, you see, with the little nostalgic poems. There's not much there that we have to pay attention to. There are all these juridical, institutional issues. The Hermits of Tuscany go on during this period. What he does is reviews each group during a given period. Now this one goes from 1616 up to the suppression, I guess, if you know what I'm saying. They kept Fontagone, I think. I don't see the head of that Cenobitical congregation up in Venice. And I'm sure that Fontagone still belongs to Pagnani.

[52:01]

But it may not have been a monastery at all. It may have been just a kind of holding group of his people. I'm not sure at this point. Oh yes, I think so. See, I think during this period, I think that was largely true. Because I don't think that Penelope was a Cenobite. I think it was only her, I think. Since 1924. That'll turn up in the next period, too. The Hermits of Piedmont, the French congregation. The Coronis, now let's take a look at the Coronis, because they were a mushrooming congregation. Notice the Hermits of Tuscany were small. They had only a few communities. The Coronis at the beginning of this period, 1616, they had 14 hermitages. That's not quite a century after just enhancing.

[53:03]

250 religious. So they're small hermitages. Whereas the Tuscans had only three hermitages plus Fontagone. And they kept increasing until Napoleon. 1669, 1880. Including six in Poland. In these different attempts at union. And during part of this time, the Hermits of Comaldoli adopted the constitutions of the Coronis. And still, there's some influence of the Coronis constitution. Okay, now the final period in Palmyra's book. 1770 to 1935. It's marked by these suppressions and the near extinction of the Comaldoli's congregation. Now he's got four suppressions listed there, but the first one doesn't involve us. It's only of interest to the general history of religions. Suppression of Jesuits from Portugal. The second one, note that Leopold I in Tuscany

[54:07]

suppressed some houses. I don't know whether he suppressed Comaldoli or not. We'll see when we get to that house in particular. That was a particular one. The second, Napoleonic suppression, concerned whole orders. For instance, the Synagogue. And the third one wiped out the Italian congregations. There's really something here. This consistency in the assault against the monastic life is obviously much more than coincidental. These things seem to come from different directions. But obviously they're not just accidentally related. Well, that would certainly not be the reason given. Consider in the time of Henry VIII when he wiped out the monasteries in England and when he butchered the Carthusians. Sometimes, in that case, it was an ideological thing

[55:10]

because they didn't want to yield to his wrong attempt to wrest the church away from Rome. Here, it's mixed up between politics and religion very often. Usually, see, the Masonic thing was anti-clerical, anti-church. A mysterious kind of malicious bite in this kind of secularism. The economic model is always there. The property of the monasteries is always involved. And sometimes, it's an attempt simply to extinguish the power of Rome, to extinguish the independent political power of the church, as exercised through religion. And sometimes, on the part of an individual ruler, as in the First Suppression,

[56:10]

he wants the religious to be doing something useful. In other words, everything has to justify itself by utility. So, if they're merely leading an idle and worthless contemplative life, wipe them out. And put properties on good use. So, all those things are true. I don't know. I don't know what personal reasons he had to be so vicious towards the religious. But remember, that was linked up with the French Revolution, which was anti-clerical, which was an anti-church movement. And it kept that thrust open. There's a general secularizing thrust that pervades all three of his ways in the First Suppression. To take things away from, out of the control of the domination,

[57:17]

the inspiration of the church. Now, he's got a summary about the Cenobites, their history. At the end of the Cenobites, from 1929 to 1935, general chapter in 1929, apostolic visitor, 1931. Obviously, I've only given a very brief digest here of what he says. And in 1934, it looked like their new constitutions were going to be approved, and things looked bright and banged. In 1935, the decree, the rescript entitled Interreligiosus Cetus, which means among religious communities, which makes of the two congregations one only, the Ur-Medical, slightly modified. Now, it's bland language for saying that the Cenobite foundation was suppressed and wiped out. It's a very rough introduction. The Holy See did it.

[58:19]

But actually, of course, very influential in these matters is the apostolic visitor that would be sent by the Holy See to a different congregation. About three different things. One thing, the Holy See always likes things to be in order, likes to have a clean house, which means it likes simplicity for one thing, okay? And if it has identified a particular order as being a hermit order, it wants it to be hermit. So it's always easy to pull that particular string. That is, for somebody to write a letter to the Holy See and say, well, this is supposed to be a hermit order, and look what it is. These people are not living in the original commodities, traditions are not like that. And sometimes the Holy See will explain it. And that, I think, kind of clued to that way of expressing it. Another thing is that there was a scandal of some kind in the Cenobite congregation, which put the whole Cenobite tradition at this point into the shadow, so it was easy for that to happen.

[59:23]

And thirdly, there must have been a good deal of tension between the two congregations. So it may be that the hermits themselves were sort of wrestling with the Cenobite group. But I don't know enough about it to say in detail. Farnani has something about it that he deliberately keeps quiet about. Now, the Cenobites had a choice as to whether to become hermits, and for that they had to make a trial in the hermitage, or to go to another kind of a monastery, or to become diocesan priests, or to go to one monastery, which was Holy Cross of Sassicoratia, where they would not be allowed to take monasteries, so that would be just a die-out thing, you see, at the end of their time. It was a pretty strict precedent. And as I say, Farnani was one of these Cenobites. I've met several outside commanders, and we had a few who...

[60:26]

The oldest one was... There's still a few living in front of us. And a very, very good old one. The decree. All houses of the Cenobites to be closed except San Gregorio, which was taken over for the procurator's place, and later became the student house. Farnani allowed it to be called a hermitage, because it wasn't a beginning, and made a house of formation, and later that was moved to San Gregorio. And San Biagio or Fabriano were the bodies of some of the others, where they left the parishments. Then he reviews the history of each of these groups up to the end of his period, up to 1935. Let's just run through that very, very quickly. The hermits of Tuscany. A few houses left in the first suppression. 1810, all the hermits would be suppressed. Monastery upon the Monastery.

[61:28]

There were 12 religious hospitality, so that was left in the function of the monastery, as a kind of hospice. When they say hospitality, I don't know if it was really medical, I don't know, and after Napoleon's fall, they were able to go back to the hermitage. You see, a very, very tragic, painful history. 1868, completely confiscated. Custodians left it to none. Ponsalazzo, there's a place over near Florence that used to be a Catholic monastery. A lovely Catholic, a few hundred years old, I think it was a couple of hundred years old, now they use it for, they give it to the monks, and they're using it for various things. Just to tell you. The hermits of Monte Carano. Feet, around 1770, there were 30 hermitages,

[62:30]

12 outside Italy. See, most of the Polish houses were wiped out in 1819. I don't know whether that was still the Napoleonic thing. That's probably the new waiver. Two remained in 1925, and there are still two. The nuns never formed a congregation or one body. And a very diverse, varying relationship with the nuns communities. Right now, I counted, see, nine communities of nuns, including the one in Africa. And in this list, a few years ago, there were ten houses in our congregation, but two of them can almost be crossed off the list. One is just a kind of a grange of the nuns, a mausoleum.

[63:30]

And another one was over in Sardinia. And that's when it was over to the nuns. And six communities of the congregation of Monte Carano, all of which are hermitages. One in Poland, one in Spain, one in Colombia, which I don't think is on here, so that would make sense. And then the obelisks. That's a very indistinct thing, the way it's described. It's not complete on your sheets, but you can copy the back of it. They had two kinds of obelisks. One was the kind that lived inside, internal obelisks, within a monastery, where they had it. And there still are some. And lived more or less the life of the community. But with a little broader role in the community. And then secular obelisks, outside of obelisks, that live in the world without a habit, lived to be very much like the third order that exists within the community. See, they had some kind of a rule

[64:32]

to live the good things in this world. They lived their ordinary life, and then came a certain life called the monastery. Okay. Any questions before we leave that? Next time, we might do a brief very brief summary. Talk about any questions that came up, and then we'll go on to that night and article, and try to look at the present situation. So I hope there is for the next ten centuries.

[65:11]

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