Families, Monastics and Private Property

.
Abbot Primate Notker Wolf opened the biennial meeting of the American Benedictine Academy with a frank and challenging presentation. He is the head of the Benedictine Confederation.

After a brief overview of the state of Benedictines in the world (about 600 more women and about 800 fewer men than five or six years ago), he took up the topic of this year's conference: The Family and Monastics.

He spoke quite frankly about common ownership. "We think we are heroes," he said, "because we renounce private property. But every parent does that. Whatever you earn, you give it away to your spouse, to your children. We are not such special heroes for this." Describing his own experience of vacationing with a family, he said, "It really teaches you to step back, to be humble. One morning, the wife was not feeling so well. We sat and waited patiently for her to come to breakfast. We had to revise several sight-seeing plans for the whole day. I just had to set my own plans aside, to be part of this family. On my own agenda, I might not have been so humble."

He spoke, too, of the need for solid discipline. "In the old days, everything was rules and rubrics," he said, "perhaps we never had the chance to really pray, we just followed the rules. But now, if each person does as he or she chooses, where is the growth? When you are a child, your parents provide the discipline. When we are adults, we discipline ourselves. But we are always only human beings. We need a social system to help us."

The Abbot Primate's talk brought much laughter of self-recognition: when he spoke of the foibles of monastics, many in the audience could think of examples in their own communities. His presentation also challenged us to consider how we would structure monastic life for the future. "After Vatican II," he said, "we did away with many things that were, really, just the romanticism and rules of the 1850s. But sometimes we did not replace them with anything. That is the solid discipline we need to develop." It was a wonderful keynote to set the agenda for the next three days of dialogue.

Abbot Primate Notker Wolf is pictured here with Sister Uslerys Pineda of St. Benedict Monastery, Canyon TX. Tip O the Hat to Sister Edith of Monastic Musings.and St Scholastica Monastery, Duluth