"Saints beget saints": a Benedictine calls for spiritual heroism

The case for monastic life; what will save the world, really?

Introducing … Nuns!

We’re starting a new feature here, with once or twice monthly posts on Benedictine and monastic spirituality for the Philokalia subsection.

I’d like to introduce you all to a pal of mine…

Mother Marie Billingsley preparing to sing the Office with us in my little workroom oratorio. Narni, October 2022

…. and a project she’s doing that I’m kind of excited about.

Long time readers will remember that two years ago I ran a funder for some friends of mine, a small group of traditional Benedictine nuns, to allow them to take part in the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage and events in Rome. The funder was a smash success and not only were we able to cover their travel and accommodation expenses, but paid for a winter of fuel for them up in their chilly little mountain village monastery.

Me (right) and Mother Marie Billingsley from two years ago. We visited the Franciscan shrine of Sacro Speco near Narni and had a picnic and a wonderful day out.

This is my friend Sr. Marie Billingsley, an American sister who is working to found a women's community affiliated with the Benedictines of the Immaculate, a small community of traditional Benedictine monks "of strict observance" in northern Italy. 

 As you may imagine, such an undertaking is difficult and fraught with lots of ups and downs at the very best of times. And these days, for a plenitude of reasons both in and outside the Church, it seems these are not exactly what you'd call ideal times. 

 But perhaps that is "thinking the thoughts of time" and not the mind of God. When you think about it, it seems more likely that the founding of deeply prayerful communities dedicated exclusively to contemplation and praise of God in the traditional forms of the Church is exactly the sort of thing God Himself would think of as a solution for bad times, not a luxury reserved for good ones.

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These little sprouts of hope are appearing quietly all over the place, though you have to look closely to see them in the White Witch's Great Winter. It is communities and groups like these sisters and monks, though they never make the headlines, where all our futures lie, even if we never meet them in this life. God is working, quietly and patiently, to bring about the revival of the Faith and the Church, in His own way, which we know is a hidden way.

But much better than just the funds was that a number of new inquirers who saw the funder sent her a note about their own vocational aspirations.

The other day she sent me something of a “manifesto” for a revival of traditional Benedictine monastic life, and asked if I could publish it. That was when we decided to start collaborating. I said I’d be happy to receive any materials she has, including spiritual conferences and talks or other things, originally for the sisters, to publish here. We agreed this would give some spiritual value to readers, as well as get the word out into the wider world about this small start-up community.

She and I have had lots of conversations about what’s going on in the Church and the world, and we are in agreement about the solution being something almost no one is thinking or talking about.¹

How can there be nuns when there are no convents?

I can hear you asking, who is this person and why am I so interested? Most of you who read me here know that I used to write quite a lot for the Remnant and One Peter Five about the situation of the vowed religious life in the Church right now, and very little of the news was good. Not only has there been hundreds of years of decline, not meaningfully opposed by a Church institution that’s been shifting its focus for the last five centuries to politics and away from spirituality, but in our time Rome has begun an all-out war on the religious life, particularly on contemplatives with a traditional mindset.

I became known, I think, as a vocal defender of traditional religious life, especially the ancient forms of contemplative monasticism. And I still hold very strongly that this is the only way we’re going to “win” in a Church whose institutional structures are collapsing and eating themselves.

Most of my articles on this subject are still out there.

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Late and Lost Vocations: the Extinction of “Traditional” Nuns

You visited convents famous for their “conservative” and more “traditional” style, only to find that under the surface – and sometimes not very far down – neomodernism was rampant in their thought and assumptions. You sat horrified in a vocation retreat conference as they enthusiastically praised the modernist theologians of the early 20th century whose greatest claim to fame was, you knew, to force their heresies into the Church through Vatican II.

Or you visited monasteries that were famous for having retained some of the artifacts of the old, say Gregorian Chant or Latin, only to discover that the nuns were committed revolutionaries who had dedicated their house to developing a Frankensteinian “reform-of-the-reform synthesis,” plastering the externals Tradition onto the New Paradigm.

In a Time of Desolation, A Calling for New Beguines?

What if there were a place for women to go who love the Lord, who felt drawn to a life of prayer and intimate union with Him, who desired a life devoted to poverty, chastity and obedience but who, for any number of reasons, could not pursue traditional religious life?..

I come back again to my thoughts on “Lost Vocations.” What if there were a whole demographic cohort of women who were the right age at decidedly the wrong time, while the religious life as it had been known, was being torn down to its roots? What if they have been turned away because they have health issues? Or because they are too old for formation? Or – and here’s the really sticky one – if they have come to realize they cannot concede any part of the Faith to fit into the New Paradigm of the Novusordoist compromise (even in its “conservative” guise) and go along with the Pope Francis-rebellion against Christ?

What do you do if you think you have a vocation to religious life and all the world is busy groaning to find itself Bergoglian?

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I make no secret that I think our institutional situation is pretty much unrecoverable via the existing systems. We’re past the point of no return there. The collapse is rapidly heading for the bottom; the institution has another 20 to 30 years left. And then what? And then we’re back to the desert.

We’re facing a situation analogous to the late 3rd century, right down to persecutions of believers from Rome. We know - they’re finally saying it out loud in front of microphones: the aim of the Bergoglians is to eliminate all expressions of the traditional Faith, and that includes religious life.

Rome is actively pressuring and threatening bishops to put up roadblocks to new religious foundations. And bishops, whose primary motivation has always been a quiet life, are obliging, particularly when there are juicy real estate properties to acquire.

But we also know that we humans do not have the controlling interest in the Church. What is God doing? And how do we respond, in these circumstances right now, to His calls? Do we just go along with the New Paradigm programme? Do we do what many bishops are doing and roll over and let it all die out? Or even help suppress it?

Or do we dare to choose a more difficult path? Can we be pioneers and start from nothing, as the ancient monastics did at the end of the old empire, just walking away, right out into the desert?

That’s what my friend Mother Marie is doing. And she’s been steadfast in the face of challenges and troubles, from finding someone to help her achieve her hopes, in the person of the Benedictine monks of the Immaculate, to standing up to managerial bishops who hate the very idea of nuns². She and her small group of pioneering ladies are settled for the time being in a small house in the village of Villatalla and are focusing on living the life as faithfully as they can. As they grow in numbers and spiritual strength, they hope for great things to come.

In her introduction below, Mother Marie speaks below about all their spiritual ambitions, and makes a case for the ancient spiritual traditions of the monastic life as the only way forward in our current darkness…

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I’ll let Mother Marie take it from here…

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The desert Fathers and the desert Mothers understood this supernatural reality: saints beget saints.

The Latin Divine Office in the Benedictine tradition, once again being sung in Liguria.

I am going to make a wild statement, that I believe completely: there is no other way to re-establish order in society and in the Church, than for each of us to seek holiness, sanctification, and that comes through martyrdom. The expression “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church” is larger, more true and more important than we think. We usually assume it refers to “red” martyrdom, saints shedding their blood for Christ.

But there is another kind.

In an article that Hilary posted here she explains that in other ages³, souls who lived in decadent times fled the world to seek God in the solitude of deserted places. These early monastics were men and women disgusted with what the world was pushing them to accept and burning with the desire to “see” God. They hid themselves in caves, they climbed the highest mountains they could find, they “peopled” the deserts. They reformed their lives and in doing so drew other souls who, becoming their disciples, learned the “trade” of becoming a monachos,⁴ a hermit, a recluse or a cenobite⁵.

In fact, in fleeing to the desert or to the mountains, our Fathers in the Faith were determined to live a life of asceticism. Fasting, working with their hands, holding vigils⁶, praying the Psalms⁷ (all 150 of them in one day) as our holy Father St. Benedict tells us. It must be understood that they considered this kind of life a preparation for martyrdom, and therefore the only means of Christianising the pagan world; they would prepare themselves to shed their blood by dying to themselves and to the world.

Little by little, from their “death to the world,” sometimes literally through martyrdom, or spiritually through their ascetic life, Christendom was born. The Christian world, starting in Syria and Egypt, and flowing over into Europe, started burgeoning with monasteries and a pan-European Christian civilization began to take root. These men and women left the world in order to give to the world something bigger than the world.

There are vocations to a life the world cannot understand

Are there still souls that understand this reality? Yes, the enemies of God and of His Church have understood this, that is why they are doing away with the contemplative life; this has been in the works for decades⁸. Little by little the monasteries have been emptied, and the world is slowly finding itself almost completely paganized again.

“These monks and nuns that do nothing all day but pray, what are they good for?” I often hear people tell us, “You shouldn’t be locking yourselves up! The young people need to see you! You need to teach in schools and help in hospitals. What a waste!” But this is the voice of faithlessness, the complaint of those who simply do not believe in the salvific action of supernatural grace, or who know nothing about what the contemplative life is for. The mysterious draw of these mystical and transcendent realities is something the worldly, the materialistic and secular - even among Catholics - cannot understand.

No, we don’t need to be “out there.” We need souls who pray, who unite themselves with God in this mystical enfolding of contemplative prayer. And until this is understood we will not have Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals, Catholic spouses, good priests, good bishops, good popes. It is simply forgotten, or never taught, that Christianity itself grew out of the desert, not out of the towns, the local parish or the busy activists. Those good things were only able to grow from the grace brought into the world by the praying ascetics.

We need souls who die to the world, so that others may live

“Unless the grain of wheat falling to the ground die, itself remaineth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.”

(John 12;24)

But now, after many many years of disintegration of Christian society, we live in a paganized society, killing children, sick, disabled and old folks. This anti-life atmosphere has reached a point that we would never have thought possible; it has entered even into the most sacred places, into the very heart of the Church, the monasteries and convents.

Old communities of monks and nuns slowly die out or are bureaucratically “euthanized,” their monasteries forcibly closed, having followed a false obedience. The “new paradigm” that has the Church in its grip has destroyed vocations to the communities that have adopted it, no more vocations are drawn to enter.

BUT it is not only the enemies that have understood this. Faithful souls also have understood this and, if sometimes only in a vague way, they know that they have to find this contemplative life again, to flee to the desert, to the mountain…

But to do this, even to find a community that holds to the ancient way, has become extremely difficult. In making life too easy we have become weak, unprepared for the life to which we are called. And because of the crises the Church has been traversing for the last 60 years, the opportunities for young men and women to find a monastery or convent that responds to their desires has been, to say the least, wanting.

Pioneers again

None of this means there is no solution, but simply that we need to slowly but surely adapt whatever means we have to give to souls once again the possibility to live this reality. There are souls willing to go against the current and take a step into the darkness of the Faith to find the light and life that is waiting for them on the other side.

Their heroic pursuit of becoming saints will beget saints, and this process will once again prepare them for martyrdom, “white or red,” and will as well draw down the graces necessary to re-establish Christendom.

God’s mysterious calling cannot be silenced, not by any earthly authority. Those who are so mysteriously attracted to this life, the ascetic traditional monastic life, know somehow that it must be found somewhere, even though it seems to have no “right” to exist in an ecclesial situation that seems not to want it.

Benedictines of the Immaculate

By the grace of God, with courage, study, and initiative, such communities do exist and the young - and not so young - are desiring to “make the desert flourish again,” (Is. 35) and the mountains to resound with the singing of the Psalms. And in aiming at becoming saints, they will beget saints.

We are a small, pioneering community of strictly contemplative Benedictine nuns, consecrated in a special way to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We live now in a small house in a tiny village in northern Italy, and we are deeply attached to the traditional liturgy of the Church. We pray the full traditional Benedictine office in Latin, and we celebrate only the Mass according to the Roman Missal promulgated by St. Pius V in 1570.

Through all sorts of ups and downs, we are persevering in the observance of the traditional monastic life, according to the Rule of St. Benedict in its most observant form. We are being formed as monastics according to the traditional customs and sources of Benedictine monastic spirituality, and the most orthodox and certain doctrinal sources; foremost the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The Rule our community lives is one of the oldest, and perhaps the most widespread. It is the Rule of St. Benedict, written in the 500s, which has not ceased to inspire and instruct countless generations since. Everything in the Rule is ordered to make the contemplative life possible for people of ordinary strength and diverse temperaments.

Many have been encouraged to take up the yoke of religious life by the moderation and accessibility of the Holy Rule, which makes many concessions to the weakness of fallen nature without losing its crisp supernatural gaze. The charism of the Benedictine Rule is simple. In its essence, it is to form good Christians; well-rounded men and women capable of living a healthy supernatural life.

The ascetic battle goes on as long as we live on this earth, though with practice it becomes increasingly effortless as the soul grows closer to the fountainhead of all holiness, God himself, who will carry her through her daily tasks with His grace.

We are calling for those who feel this call to these ancient forms of spiritual life to come and see, to have courage and to know that you are not alone and there is hope of a fulfilment of this dream.

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HJMW again:

This is the community I’m going to be visiting for a couple of days with some friends, to celebrate the feast of St. Benedict on the 11th, to have a nice little monastic holiday. We’ll be keeping in touch with Mother Marie, and hearing from her as often as I can convince her to talk more about the Benedictine spiritual life.

Here is a button to click for more information about their community, including contact information.

1. In the text that follows, I [HJMW] have added some footnotes to clarify a few things that might not be familiar to some readers.

2. About a year ago the local bishop made some trouble, after receiving pressure from Rome, and issued a statement saying they aren’t “really” nuns. (In fact, they’re technically sisters in a Private Association of the Faithful, in what are called “simple vows”). A secular journalist, gleefully enjoying a little nunny scandal, accused them of being “a group of foreign women wearing monastic habits and pretending to be nuns.” The whole thing, culminated in Mother Marie receiving letters from the relevant dicastery in Rome acknowledging that as a religious in vows, and in formation from a recognised Benedictine foundation, she and the other sisters have every right to wear the Benedictine habit that foundation has conferred on them. In the immemorial custom of the universal Church, habits are given not by bishops but by religious superiors.

Since this tempest in a teapot, she and the other sisters and the various inquirers have been quietly getting on with it. The bishop, who had acted without bothering even to meet with her or her religious superior Fr. Jehane de Belleville, was forced to back down, stating simply that he never wanted any nuns of any sort in his diocese.

Shortly after this storm had passed, their delightful postulant, Sr. Veronica, received the habit and became Sr. Scolastica, with nary a peep of objection from the bishop or Rome.

3. Monasticism as we understand the term today, began at the end of the period of the Roman persecutions in the 4th century. Devout souls felt that they needed the same level of challenge, and sought the ascetic life as a replacement for the “red martyrdom” of the previous period. The early monastics lived lives of extreme privation, dwelling in small huts built into caves in the arid deserts of Egypt and Syria. They often formed “lauras” or colonies of hermits, where the individual monk would live in his cave dwelling within a short walk to his nearest monastic neighbour. Such communities of solitary ascetics would meet once a week in a central chapel for the community liturgies. Cenobitic monasticism, in which all the monks lived, slept, prayed and worked under the same roof, was a later development.

4. A solitary monk; not necessarily the same thing as a hermit.

5. A monk who lived in community with other monks. This is the normal form of life for Benedictines.

6. Praying through the night.

7. The “Divine Office” is a system by which the 150 Psalms are chanted or recited, grouped for the different times of day, (the “hours”), throughout the week. The Psalter is organised in the Rule of St. Benedict so the whole book of Psalms is recited through once a week.

• Psalms: These form the backbone of the Divine Office, with selections chosen for each hour to reflect the themes of the day or liturgical season.

• Scripture Readings: Short passages from the Old and New Testaments are included.

• Hymns: Sung or recited prayers that express praise and thanksgiving to God.

• Canticles: Short, poetic songs of praise from the Bible, like the Magnificat or Benedictus.

• Spread throughout the week: The Psalms are spread out across various prayer times (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline) with specific sections assigned to each.

• Weekly completion: By strategically assigning Psalms throughout the week, the Rule ensures the entire Psalter is recited within that timeframe.

• More here.

8. In fact, for over 200 years secularist governments, from emperors to republics, have been working to suppress contemplative monastic life. We will learn all about this in our upcoming e-book “What happened to all the Monasteries?” available to purchase soon. Paid members of this website are able to download a free PDF of the first chapter, here.