LIVES OF DEVOTION

It is the early sixth century AD and Christianity is well on its way to establishing itself as the dominant religion across the former western Roman empire. Yet not everyone, it seems, is adhering to Jesus’ teachings. In fact, so appalled is one man by the people of Rome’s licentiousness – their preference for wine, women and song over abstinence, piety and prayer – that he decides to live as a hermit inside a cave some 40 miles east of what once was the imperial capital.

That man is known today as Saint Benedict of Nursia, and the plan he hatched while living in isolation in the foothills of central Italy 1,500 years ago would change the course of history.

In his , written in the late sixth century, Pope Gregory I wrote that Benedict’s “age was inferior to his virtue: all vain pleasure he condemned.” And such was Benedict’s disdain for “vain