Feast day: June 19
St. Romuald
Italian nobleman who entered a monastery in penance for his family's violence and founded the Camaldolese hermit order.
Romuald was born about 950 into a noble family of Ravenna, in Italy, and spent his youth in the careless and even dissolute manner of his class — until, at about twenty, he witnessed his own father kill a relative in a duel over property. Horrified, he withdrew to a monastery to do forty days of penance for the deed, and there resolved to become a monk himself.
Finding even monastic life too lax for his longing, he was drawn ever deeper into solitude, becoming a hermit and seeking out holy ascetics from whom to learn. For the rest of his long life he wandered through Italy, founding and reforming hermitages and monasteries, an austere and sometimes severe figure forever in search of greater perfection.
His great achievement was to weave together the two ancient strands of monastic life — the solitary life of the hermit and the communal life of the monastery — into a single order. About 1012 he established his most famous foundation at Camaldoli, in the mountains of Tuscany, giving his name to the Camaldolese, whose monks live as hermits yet within a community.
He died in 1027. Through the Camaldolese, Romuald kept alive within the Western Church the radical, solitary spirit of the desert fathers, and he is honoured as a patron of hermits and of the contemplative life.
His rule for hermits begins: 'Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it.'
“Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it.”
— St. Romuald
Image: Fra Angelico (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/13179b.htm
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