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Today there are about 25,000 Benedictine monks and nuns, as well as over 5,000 Cistercians and others who live according to the Rule of St. Benedict. In the last 40 years, these numbers have been declining, but the number of "oblates," lay people associated with monasteries, is growing rapidly and now exceeds the number of monks and nuns. Many of them are Protestants.
—contributed by Hugh Feiss, OSB

Visit Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma and you will see something as close to 12th-century Benedictine monastic life as can be found in the 21st century. It all began in 1972 when a group of University of Kansas students discovered Fontgombault, a traditional Benedictine monastery in France known for its Gregorian chant, traditional Latin liturgy, and strict adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict. Around 30 students stayed at the abbey as guests, and a handful never left. The abbot of Fontgombault called it the "American Invasion."

Now Fontgombault has come to America. The students-turned-monks returned to the U.S. in the 1990s and founded Clear Creek Monastery. There, they continue to pursue a traditional Benedictine lifestyle.

Benedict encouraged his monks to be silent as often as possible. But of course, some form of communication is necessary in order for people to live together. In The Year 1000, Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger describe a Benedictine sign language manual from Canterbury listing no less than 127 hand signals, including signs for various people in the monastery, ordinary objects such as a pillow ("Stroke the sign of a feather inside your left hand"), and requests such as "Pass the salt" ("Stroke your hands with your three fingers together, as if you were salting something"). 

"One gets the impression," write Lacey and Danzinger, "that mealtimes in a Benedictine refectory were rather like a gathering of baseball coaches, all furiously beckoning, squeezing their ear lobes, meaningfully rubbing their fingers up and down the sides of their noses, and smoothing their hands over their stomachs."

One of the greatest treasures from the era of Charlemagne that survives today is the Plan of St. Gall. This architectural drawing (reconstructed here) depicts a Benedictine monastery perfectly suited to the monastic life of prayer, study, and work. The monastery was never built, for reasons that are a mystery to us. But scholars believe the plan was developed in the ninth century as an example of the ideal monastery. A copy survives because Abbot Gozbert (816-837) requested it to guide his building program at the monastery of St. Gall and preserved it in the library there.

The plan tells us a lot about medieval monastic life, including the fact that in the ninth century a monastery was meant to be self-sustaining—almost a mini-village in itself, complete with vegetable and herb gardens, granary, livestock, medical facilities, library, laundry, craft workshops, and guest lodging.

Benedict emphasized the role of manual labor as a God-given part of human life and instructed his monks to spend appropriate amounts of time each day in work, prayer, and reading. According to a long-standing thesis, Benedictine monks changed the West's view of work from being looked down upon to being respected as a form of prayer—leading, in turn, to the rise of capitalism. This argument has its flaws. It is true, however, that Benedictines were very good at "estate management," and that they helped to teach others the value of a regular, disciplined working life.
—contributed by Glenn W. Olsen

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