Benedict was born around 480 in the province of Norcia and sent by wealthy parents to study at Rome. ¹² He abandoned his studies, disturbed by the dissolute lives of the other students, wanting only to "please God," and withdrew into the mountains east of the city. ¹

It is worth noticing that this is a young man rejecting a promising future because the culture around it disgusted him. The most influential institution-builder in Western monasticism began by refusing an institution.

At Subiaco he lived alone for three years in a cave later called the Sacro Speco, the Holy Grotto. ¹ Benedict XVI describes him overcoming three fundamental temptations in that solitude: self-affirmation, sensuality, and anger or revenge. ¹

Those three are not medieval curiosities. They are ego, appetite, and resentment - and a person who has not made peace with them will not be able to live with other people, which is what Benedict was about to spend the rest of his life arranging.

In 529 he moved to Monte Cassino, a shift Benedict XVI reads as the move from private holiness to a mission visible to the Church and to society. ¹ There he wrote the Rule.

He described it himself as "minimal, just an initial outline." ¹ That modesty is the reason it worked: it is short, it is moderate, it assumes people are ordinary, and it balances prayer with work rather than demanding heroics. Its governing instruction is the one Benedict XVI quotes: "Let nothing be preferred to the Work of God" - the Divine Office. ¹ Everything else in the day arranges itself around that fixed point.

He died on 21 March 547. ¹ On 24 October 1964 Paul VI proclaimed him Patron of Europe, recognizing what the monasteries built on his Rule had done for the continent. ¹

Benedict is patron of Europe, of monastics, and of schoolchildren, and is invoked against poisoning and in kidney disease. ² The European patronage is the substantive one, and it is a historical claim as much as a devotional one.

The feast of Saint Benedict is celebrated on July 11. ²

When your days have no shape. This is what the Rule is for. Benedict's insight was that holiness is mostly a scheduling problem - fix the hours of prayer and let everything else arrange itself around them. ¹ It works outside a monastery too.

When you are trying to be heroic and failing. He called his own Rule "minimal, just an initial outline." ¹ It is deliberately moderate, written for ordinary people who will be doing this for decades. Sustainability is not a lesser ambition than intensity.

When ego, appetite or resentment is the thing in your way. Those are the three temptations Benedict XVI says he faced down in the cave at Subiaco. ¹ Naming which of the three is actually yours is most of the work.

When you have to live with difficult people. The Rule is a document about community, written by a man who first learned to be alone. ¹ Solitude first, then company - in that order, because the other way round does not hold.

When you want to build something that lasts. He wrote a short, temperate document and it outlived the Roman world. Paul VI named him patron of the continent it rebuilt. ¹ Modest and durable beats ambitious and brittle.