| Volume 35, Number 3 |
Richardton, ND 58652
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July 2007
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| ITALIAN MEMORIES: 1975-1977 by Fr. Terrence Kardong, O.S.B. After two years of teaching at Mary College in Bismarck (1971-73), I returned to the Abbey as formation director. I was not very good at many aspects of that job, but I did give decent classes. Yet I felt I was out of my depth when I dealt with monastic spirituality. I felt unable to judge the various schools and conflicting theories that you constantly bumped into. I felt I needed to get a good solid education in a graduate program. But to do that, one had to go to Rome to the Benedictine college of Sant’ Anselmo. |
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| Abbot Robert readily gave per-mission for a two-year course for the licentiate, which is equivalent to a Master’s Degree in most universities. I departed for Italy in August of 1975, and stayed in Europe until July, 1977. Initially, I was not too eager to study in Rome, because I have an aversion to Ultramontane Catholicism—the kind that revels in papal ceremonies. Furthermore, I associated Rome with the kind of Baroque art and architecture that I find oppressive. Of course, I did find plenty of artistic bombast in Rome, but I also grew to love the place. |
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| My first six weeks were spent in Florence, where Fr. Roger Kasprick of Collegeville and I went to learn Italian. Those were glorious weeks, but we did not learn Italian. The idea of going to an Italian tutor, Signora Baldini, in the morning, and gabbing in English to each other in the afternoon, was fundamentally unsound. I think we would have needed at least three months of complete immersion in Italian to reach a level where we would at least understand ordinary speech. Some people think Italian is just Latin with all the words in the ablative case, but they are quite wrong. My strong Latin background enabled me to learn to read Italian quickly, but that is quite different from comprehending it when spoken at high speed, and most Italians speak at high speed. At any rate, it turned out that Italian was somewhat beside the point in Florence. The place is a sort of treasure chest of the finest medieval and renaissance art and architecture. It is full of wonderful churches and museums, which we wandered through day after day. I think both of us were sort of drunk on beauty those days. In a way, Florence is almost too much, too concentrated, too perfect. Sometimes one longed for some bad taste. And the place is badly overcrowded; simply too small for the thousands who throng its streets. We lived in a gorgeous monastery on the mountainside overlooking the city. San Miniato is one of the finest late medieval churches in Italy and we prayed in it every day. The monastery itself was huge, but had only a dozen or so monks. They let us stay there gratis, if we would only say Mass for their intentions. This seemed like a ludicrously good deal, but whenever we wanted to go traveling (and miss Mass), they got quite upset. In fact, the atmosphere there was puzzling to me in many ways. When I passed through there the next summer and casually stopped in to ask to stay over night, the Prior became very agitated. Finally, he blurted out that their cook had threatened to quit if they had any more guests! So I finally found out who was in charge. One character from San Miniato that I won’t forget was a simple old fellow named Vittorio who used to do some janitor work. One day I had a rather traumatic accident in the shower. When I twisted the hot water faucet, it came clean off and very hot water shot directly at my stomach. Before I could wrestle the faucet back on, the whole room was three inches deep in water. I quickly dressed and fetched Vittorio to mop it up. He came all right, with a stick and tiny rag no bigger than a handkerchief. I used to call him “francobolli,” because he always asked me: “Hai dei francobolli?” He collected postage stamps. Still, I should not be ungrateful to the Olivetans at San Miniato. They were very kind to us. In fact, one day the Abbot drove us to their motherhouse at Monte Oliveto, south of Siena. It’s a difficult place to reach without a car, and a fascinating remnant of the middle ages. For example, the shaft of the medieval outhouse is still attached to the building, but now it houses the elevator. I’ve often contemplated what it must have been like with four privies stacked one on top another. They also showed us the former prison house, which is now a restaurant. It was the only monastic prison I saw preserved in Europe. The big iron rings were still hanging from the walls, and they saved the graffiti for the archives. The medieval fishponds were also preserved. Another great trip I took with Fr. Roger led to Ravenna and Venice. Ravenna is an amazing place, since you have Byzantine churches from the fifth and sixth century still intact and beautifully preserved. But what I remember most from Ravenna was the hospitality we received from the Vallombrosian Benedictine monks at Sant’ Apollinare in Classe. That is a fabulous basilica south of town where they ran the parish. Unlike the monks at San Miniato, these fellows were truly uninhibited. Meals always featured wild, animated arguments and roaring laughter. These were the Italians I was looking for, and I remember going to bed intensely happy. In mid-October I moved to Rome to begin studies at Sant’ Anselmo. The Roman school year runs from late October to late June. The Benedictine college is situated on one of the seven hills of Rome, the Aventine, which is probably the highest and most picturesque. The massive buildings are dramatically situated on a high bluff overlooking the River Tiber. The college is located in the southwest quadrant of Rome, and has a magnificent view across the Tiber to St. Peter’s and the Vatican. Since Sant’ Anselmo is the world headquarters of the Benedictines, it may come as some surprise to learn that it was in fact built by the Vatican in the 1890s. Pope Leo XIII, like many of his predecessors, found the decentralized Benedictines hard to deal with, so he urged them to develop a centralized structure. He succeeded in setting up an Abbot Primate and in developing an international college for monks. But the abbots of the world were not too enthusiastic about either initiative, and the Pope built the huge institution out of his own pocket (which obviously was very deep). Popes were still confined to the Vatican in those days, and it is said that Leo watched the construction daily through a telescope. Sant’ Anselmo is still the product of Benedictine “disorganization” or at least decentralization. The Abbot Primate has little real power over any abbey or monk. He has to beg, borrow and steal professors and staff from the various abbeys, none of whom are bound to cooperate. As for students, there are usually about a hundred living there, mostly from Germany, USA and the Third World. Some countries, like France, hardly participate in Sant’ Anselmo at all. The Spaniards are not there in any great number, either. That could be because some monastic traditions simply do not believe in sending monks out to study. The Athenaeum of Sant’ Anselmo includes a number of separate faculties: theology, philosophy, liturgy and monastic studies. Some of the students come from outside the institution, and some of the monks living at Sant’ Anselmo go to school at other Roman universities such as the Biblicum, the Gregorianum and the Augustinianum. The system of education is typically European, with much lecture and little discussion. Students do not do much writing, and examinations are brief orals at the end of each semester. When I came, I thought it was inferior to the American seminar system, and when I left I felt the same. Perhaps part of my feeling came from the fact that my school, the Monastic Institute, was in very poor shape at the time I was there. During my two years, there was hardly a full-time professor involved, and there were so few classes that I had to fill up my program by taking classes at the Greg and the Angelicum. The classes were generally poor, at least in my judgment, and since I myself had been teaching for 15 years, I don’t think that judgment was uninformed. We had some great names teaching us, but they were not great teachers. Indeed, we knew that a few of them were simply not prepared when they nipped into the library a few minutes before class to pick up a few scraps for us. (I am told that the program is much better in 2007). Despite the poor classes, I did not waste my time at Sant’ Anselmo. At my age, I was quite able to read for myself, and that reading prepared me for monastic scholarship for the next 25 years. The library was not good because many of the books had been stolen. And it was almost totally devoid of books in English. But that was greatly to my advantage, for it forced me to read hour after hour in the European languages I would need to know to do research: German, French and Italian. After those two years, I never hesitated to tackle material written in those languages. The professor I originally came to listen to, we will call him “Fr. Anselm,” turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment. He gave good talks, but they really were more like popular lectures for non-specialists. In fact, most of his students were simply seminarians picking up credits in monastic studies. As I remember, there were only two graduate students in the program at that time. Consequently, he did not enter into serious discussions of methodology at all. His classes on Cassian were much better than those on the Rule of Benedict, even though he was, and is, probably the greatest scholar of Benedict in the whole history of monasticism. One of Anselm’s peculiarities was that he hated to find himself at lunch across from a stranger, for he had no “small talk.” So he would choose one of his students, or a fellow professor, for his table companion. The few times he chose me I found his conversation stimulating and quite enjoyable, but I never had the impression that he felt he could learn anything from me. Yet I must confess that there was never good chemistry between us. He seemed to resent me as an older, independent-minded person who would challenge him if I saw fit. One day he called me aside and told me to make the students wear their monastic habits to his class. I told him that I would certainly wear my habit, but as for asking anyone else to do so, well, that was his problem. He was not happy. (to be continued) |
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