St Benedict was the founder of the first religious order in the West. He was born in 480 at Nursia, in the province of Umbria, Italy, and died in 543. In early youth he renounced the world and passed some years in solitude, acquiring a great reputation for sanctity. Being chosen head of a monastery his strictness proved too great for the monks, and he was forced to leave. The rule for monks, which he afterwards drew up, was first introduced into the monastery on Monte Cassino, in the neighbourhood of Naples, founded by him. His Regula Monachorum, in which he aimed, among other things, at repressing the irregular lives of the wandering monks, gradually became the rule of all the western monks. Under his rule the monks, in addition to the work of God (as he called prayer and the reading of religious writings), were employed in manual labour, in the instruction of the young, and in copying manuscripts, thus preserving many literary remains of antiquity. Research St Benedict
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