St. Romuald

Saint Romuald (c. 951-1027) was the father of the Camaldolese, the monastic family that joined the common life of the monastery to the solitude of the hermitage. Born around 951 into the noble Onesti family of Ravenna, he passed a worldly youth until, according to his biographers, he witnessed his father kill a kinsman in a duel over property. Shaken, the young man withdrew to the great Benedictine abbey of Sant'Apollinare in Classe near Ravenna to do forty days of penance, and there he resolved to become a monk. Finding even monastic observance too lax for his hunger for God, Romuald placed himself under a hermit named Marinus near Venice and later spent about a decade at the abbey of Cuxa in the Pyrenees, studying the traditions of the Desert Fathers. The rest of his long life was spent wandering through Italy, founding and reforming hermitages and monasteries, drawing restless souls, including former emperors' courtiers and would-be martyrs, to lives of solitude, silence, and psalmody. The emperor Otto III had him made abbot of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, but he resigned within a year or two, unable to bend the community to reform, and returned to the eremitic life he loved. His most enduring foundation came near the end of his life, when he established the hermitage of Camaldoli, high in the Tuscan Apennines, around the 1020s, together with a monastery lower down the mountain. From this pairing grew the Camaldolese Benedictines, whose distinctive vocation unites hermits and cenobites in one family. A brief rule attributed to Romuald counsels the monk to sit in his cell as in paradise, to put the whole world behind him, and to watch his thoughts like a fisherman watching the water, a miniature masterpiece of contemplative wisdom. What is known of his life comes largely from the biography written about 1042 by Saint Peter Damian, himself a Camaldolese reformer. Romuald died alone in his cell at the monastery of Val di Castro, near Fabriano, on June 19, 1027. His relics were later enshrined at Fabriano, where they remain. He was canonized in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, and his feast is celebrated on June 19. The hermitage and monastery of Camaldoli continue as living communities and welcome pilgrims seeking silence in the forested mountains where he settled his hermits a thousand years ago.