An update from Norcia

Via Rorate:

"How monks and monasteries saved civilization and killed usury"

Jones E. Alexis, "How monks and monasteries saved civilization and killed usury" (Veterans Today, February 12, 2014) -- a few excerpted passages:

In the first century, Christ cast the moneylenders out of the Temple, but they gradually arose again during the thirteenth century, which created economic panic among the peasants.

For example, the French town of Villefrance wrote to King Philip IV in the thirteenth century, saying that moneylenders “are absolutely and utterly destroying the town and district.”[1]

The moneylenders throughout the Middle Ages were involved in exploiting the peasants, and thus were hated. Even philo-Semitic historians such as James Parkes admitted that this was the case, where interest rates ranged between 22 and 173 percent.

Similar exorbitant interest rates were widespread throughout medieval England and France. The people behind all of this of course were Jewish moneylenders.[2] During that period, the word “Judaize” took a radical meaning.

Historian W. C. Jordan declared that it meant “to act like an outsider, to regard others not as brothers but under a different set of rules that permitted forms of exploitation that were forbidden to the circle of brothers and friends.”[3]

... the monasteries were dedicated for people who would follow the principle of not only self-denial, celibacy, and obedience, but would also abstain from worldly attractions such as wealth.

Celibacy was important because “those who did not marry did not need money to support their families, nor did they need the autonomy necessary to use that money wisely as heads of households.” As E. Michael Jones points out,

The monasteries became wealthy in the mundane sense by ignoring wealth. The individual monks renounced money, but their labors produced enormous wealth for the monasteries. The wealth grew over generations because the monks did not have children or the expenses they require.

More importantly, their lands were not constantly divided as children inherited the land from their father....[8]

By the time Charlemagne was crowned in 800, usury was already forbidden in the monasteries and Charlemagne reinforced that teaching. Charlemagne was a powerful force for spreading literacy and he even instructed those in the monasteries:

“Take care to make no difference between the sons of serfs and of freemen, so that they might come and sit on the same benches to study grammar, music, and arithmetic.”[67]

... [Few scholars] take into consideration the fact that kings and queens appointed their own “bishops” and “monks,” many of whom were sinful people that ended up following the course of this world, something that was radically different than the ways early monks saw the monasteries.

There is ample evidence which shows that lending money at interest was even practiced among some bishops in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries,[76] but in every case these people were appointees who had been seeking an earthly kingdom.

Durant declared, “As wealth mounts, religion declines,”[77] a statement which seems to reflect what the early church stood for ....

Businessmen of course were the first to shout for joy when the teachings of the church with respect to usury declined....

Yet seldom are these practices placed in comparison to those monks who actually repudiated the practice of usury and even indulgences.

The only person able to do such differentiation (to my knowledge) is Edward Gibbon. Gibbon blamed the Church for the fall of the Roman Empire, calling those monks “unfaithful stewards” who were involved in “rapacious usury.”

But Gibbon also suggested that this was not a widespread phenomenon. Pagans were in awe of the Church’s charity in taking care of the poor and needy; this “materially conduced to the progress of Christianity.”[78]

A final point we should emphasize here is that during the Middle Ages and beyond, the Church established the most highly regarded institutions in the world.

Oxford and Cambridge, along with other universities in places such as Toulouse, Orleans, Naples, Salamanca, Seville, Lisbon, Grenoble, Padua, Rome, Perugia, Pisa, Modena, Florence, Prague, Cracow, Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, Ofen, Erfurt, Leipzig, and Rostock were founded solely for the glory of God and the benefit of His creatures.

[Hat tip to L.S.]

Criminal serving time with monks begs to be sent back to prison

And they used to call them "hardened criminals" ...

"Criminal serving his sentence with monks pleads to be sent back to prison... because monastery life is too hard" (Mail Online, January 5, 2012):

Thief David Catalano, 31, was sent to a Santa Maria degli Angeli community run by Capuchin monks in Sicily last November.

But he found their austere lifetstyle too tough to handle and soon escaped. After a short while on the run he was caught by police and sent back.


On Monday he fled for the second time in six weeks, only to swiftly turn himself in at a police station and beg officers to send him back to jail in the nearby town of Nicosia.

He told the stunned policemen: 'Prison is better than being at that hostel run by monks.'

A police spokesman said: 'Catalano arrived out of the blue and said there was no way he could stay on with the monks.

[Hat tip to Fr. Z.]

"This is our work ..."

Vignette of the Norbertine Life at St. Michael's Abbey from St. Michael's Abbey on Vimeo.

[Hat tip to Arieh Ordronneau]

Related

Tridentine Community News (February 4, 2007), includes: (1) "Tridentine Travelogue: Mission San Juan Capistrano, Orange County, California" and "St. Michael’s Abbey, Silverado, California"

Incomensurabile perspectives

Wilfred M. McClay has a great article in the June/July issue of First Things celebrating the republication of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor's 1957 account of monastic life, A Time to Keep Silence. "That such a book would emerge from Fermor," says McClay, "seems about as likely as Teddy Roosevelt's producing a cookbook for vegans." Fermor was a larger-than-life figure. He fought heroically against the Nazis, parachuting into occupied Crete in 1942 in order to work for two years as a resistance organizer, living in the mountains disguised as a shepherd. He is best remembered, says McClay, for masterminding the daring 1944 operation capturing the island's German military commander. Disguised in the uniform of a German corporal, he managed to abscond with his prisoner in a hijacked staff car through fourteen checkpoints before smuggling him by boat to Cairo.

Nothing about this background would suggest a remote interest in anything like monasticism. Fermor entered the Abbey of St. Wandrille, one of the oldest and most beautiful Benedictine abbeys in France, not as a pilgrim or because of any spiritual longing of which he was aware, but on the recommendation of a friend who thought it might be a quiet and inexpensive retreat for him to work on his book.

What follows are three paragraphs I've extracted from McClay's article that reveal two incommensurable perspectives upon Fermor's entry into the abbey:

At first, the plan appears to have been a bad idea. No sooner did he settle in than a mood of unbearable loneliness fell on him "like a hammer-stroke." The place seemed to him "an enormous tomb, a necropolis of which I was the only living inhabitant." Eyeing the monks as they glided into the cloisters for vespers, their bodies concealed beneath voluminous gowns and their faces nearly hidden in the tunnels of their pointed black hoods, Fermor thought they looked "desperately sad," their skin "preternaturally pale, some of them nearly green," their faces at once haggard and smooth, with never a smile or a frown crossing their lips, eyes always downcast, no emotion visible other than an occasional flash of what looked like melancholy. In their presence, he writes, "I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero, the blood running every second thinner and slower as if the heart might in the end imperceptibly stop beating." Back in his cell, overcome with gloom, he downed a flask of Calvados and brooded.

After some days, though, these feelings imperceptibly slipped away, gradually replaced by respect for what these monks were doing with their lives. Only someone who has lived in a monastery, Fermor argues, can grasp "its staggering difference from the ordinary life that we lead." The two ways of life "do not share a single attribute." The period of adjustment can be painful, but he soon came to see the abbey as "the reverse of a tomb," as his unnamed inner torments released their grip and the monks became real people to him -- lively and highly educated men who, far from being feeble and emaciated escapists, were living in "a state of white-hot conviction and striving to which their is never a holiday."

Their devotion to prayer and worship, their keen interest in science and humanistic learning, the graceful buildings and peaceful grounds they assiduously maintained: All of these, far from being signs of fearful withdrawal, were the distinguishing marks of civilization itself. In the end, he concluded, it was he and not the monks who was the escapist."

The incommensurability of these two perspectives on monastic life, which Fermor personally lived through, strike me as fascinatingly similar to the transformation of perspectives undergone in a religious conversion. Ludwig Wittgenstein liked to use the image of the "duck-rabbit" to show that the same data, viewed in two different ways, can yield completely different interpretations. All McClay says here is that after some days, Fermor's initial "feelings imperceptibly slipped away, gradually replaced by respect for what these monks were doing with their lives." This is the part that interests me: what happened during those few days when Fermor underwent this transformation. There is no algorithm for executing this transformation? It's a wonderfully mysterious process that requires a disposition of openness and receptivity, to see what is there (the data) with new eyes under the transforming influence of grace.