One aspect about them that might be mentioned is their ancient roots. Most Benedictine abbeys are old, or otherwise in possession of a lineage that goes back—without scratching very deeply—to late antiquity and the early medieval period.

     Assumption Abbey, for example, exists because of its mother abbey of Einsiedeln in Switzerland. Einsiedeln was founded in 934, and it, in turn, claims as mother the even more ancient abbey of Reichenau, founded in 724. That early medieval date brings us back almost to antiquity and the time of St. Benedict who established the famous abbeys of Subiaco and Monte Cassino in the third century A.D. and wrote his Rule for Monasteries around 525.

     Benedictine monks own a history nearly twice as long as that of the Franciscan friars, who were founded by St. Francis in the early 13th century. And Benedictines have been known for more than three times the long and honorable history of the Jesuits, founded by St. Ignatius in 1539. Benedictine abbeys are so old, in fact, that they predate the schism between the East and the West—the separation of the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches—in 1054. Benedictines also predate, by many hundreds of years, the Protestant Reformation, which began in the early 1500s.

     For one thing, Benedictines call themselves monks. A Jesuit would be very reluctant to style himself a monk; such a word does not describe him. And Franciscans are friars, a word they use to distinguish themselves apart from monks. The term monk is usually applied only to Benedictines, Cistercians and Carthusians, and not to canons, friars, or members of religious institutions of more recent establishment.

     Nearly every dictionary gives, as a definition of monk, a male religious living in a cloister and devoting himself to contemplation and prayer and work. Jesuits, Franciscans and other religious, such as Redemptorists, Marists, Paulists, Passionists and Salvatorians, do not as a rule spend a lot of time inside monasteries. They are in parishes, missions, schools, relief organizations, clinics, prisons and hospitals working in the midst of a busy world.

     The very first thing a monk does, then, making him visibly different from the population at large, is to live in an abbey. The Benedictine monk lives in a cloister, according to the Rule of St. Benedict. “The first and most fundamental manifestation of such a vocation,” says the encyclopedia, “is a real and effective separation from the world. All monks are, by definition, solitaries.” That’s because the word monk means solitary in Greek.

     The Benedictine is a solitary by avocation: he seeks God, strives to live for God alone, and such an effort requires private prayer and a certain amount of time alone. In actual practice, most Benedictines live with other monks inside their cloister, and in living together they encourage one another in prayer. The fact that some Benedictines are pastors and teachers living away from the abbey does not, in any way, define them. These monks are responding to urgent demands, to the peculiar exigencies of an abbey’s history. But if we read the Rule of St. Benedict, we are overwhelmed with the importance of cloister for the monk.

     Inside the abbey, fraternal life is a given. Monks pray and work side by side. The Rule of St. Benedict establishes a “school of the Lord’s service” wherein monks look after one another, and few complain of loneliness. Benedictine monks throw in their lot together in a common ownership of goods, live and work as a family, and fully benefit from shared gifts and talents. They enjoy a type of life that is separate enough from the world as to stand as an unusual testament: a collective witness of celibate Christian brotherhood that is both ancient and quite natural.