Pax

Quire, Ampleforth Abbey, Yorkshire, September 2013

‘The founders of the great religious orders have picked up, each in his own characteristic way, that one life-giving message which our Lord Jesus Christ brought to earth. St Francis seized upon his poverty, St Philip Neri on his simplicity, St Paul of the cross on his love of suffering, St Ignatius on his untiring zeal to do the will of his heavenly Father. But the great saint whose memory we are celebrating today, the founder, directly or indirectly, of all our Western monastic institutions, caught up and preserved for ever as the watchword of his order a single word from that interview in the cenacle; the word “peace”. In a world so full of unruly agitations and turbulent emotions there should be cells - tombs, if you will - where men should live consciously striving to attain the peace of Christ... That motto, Pax, which you see written up everywhere in Benedictine monasteries, is the same motto you see written up in graveyards, and for the same reason. They have inherited the peace of the first Easter Day, the peace which came from a tomb’.

Mgr Ronald Knox, 1888-1957

O eternal God, who didst make thine Abbot Saint Benedict a wise master in the school of thy service, and a guide for many called into the common life to follow the rule of Christ: grant that we may put thy love above all things, and seek with joy the way of thy commandments; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen. - Divine Worship: The Missal.