A Star in the Darkness

In the year 529, the civilization of Rome was a fainting glimmer. That year Saint Benedict of Nursia, founder of the Benedictine Order, established its abbey on Monte Cassino--a steady light, on a steep hill, which was ultimately to illuminate all Western Europe. In February 1944, seeking out a German observation post, U.S. bombers demolished the abbey, and put out the light.

The light had shone from one of history's great treasure houses, which was a library and a school as well. In the school, the oldest in Christendom, Saint Thomas Aquinas was once a pupil. In the library, which included unique manuscripts of Tacitus, Apuleius and Varro, such Renaissance scholars as Giovanni Boccaccio browsed and pilfered. Adalhard, Charlemagne's cousin, became a monk at Monte Cassino. So did Paul the Deacon, to whom Charlemagne wrote, in a letter, a phrase which epitomizes the abbey: Est nam certa quies fessis venientibus illuc--"For there is certain rest for the weary who come there."

Schoolmasters to the World. From the abbey had gone forth the Benedictine monks who had mainly converted and civilized all Western Europe but Ireland. By the beginning of the 14th Century the Benedictines had given to their church 15,000 bishops, 7,000 archbishops, 200 cardinals, 24 popes. And they had become schoolmasters to the world. They preserved and taught handicrafts and the rudiments of science; Monte Cassino itself was second only to Salerno as a seat of medical learning. The Benedictines kept and copied poetry and letters and the Scriptures; they kept and developed the art of music. For century upon dark century, all men & women who possessed minds and hearts awake enough to hold learning and beauty in high regard had only one sure refuge and one sure lifework: in the monasteries and the convents.

Stone Palimpsest. Much of the Abbey of Monte Cassino, at the time the bombers destroyed it, dated only from the 17th Century; for it had suffered already, through more than a millennium, under the Lombards and the Saracens, and the Napoleonic French, and by earthquake as well. But some remained from the 11th Century; and a little from the 6th. Virtually all of the stone palimpsest was rendered forever illegible by the bombers. But the irreplaceable possessions of the library, its 1,200 MSS. and 40,000 records, were removed by the Hermann Goering Division. Monte Cassino's librarian and archivist, Don Mauro Inguanez, rescued the ashes of Shelley and the holographs of Keats's last miseries in Rome, smuggling them out among his personal papers in a German military car.

Last week Don Mauro was back in Europe after six months in the U.S., setting afoot a campaign to restore Monte Cassino. Fortnight ago, on the 1,400th anniversary of Saint Benedict's death, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical commending the study of the saint's life and work, and pleading for the restoration of the abbey. Saint Benedict, the Pope said, had kept alive the flame of religion and culture as "a star in the darkness of night."

Immediately after the destruction of the abbey, a group of U.S. sponsors had organized as the Friends of Monte Cassino. They included Swarthmore's ex-President Dr. Frank Aydelotte, Harvard's classicist Professor E. K. Rand, Princeton's medievalist Dr. E. A. Lowe (who had studied at Monte Cassino) and Morgan Librarian Dr. Belle da Costa Greene. They had issued a statement, conveying "to the Abbot and monks of Monte Cassino, now in exile, the expression of our sorrow and sympathy in this hour of tragedy and trial. We . . . ardently wish to contribute our mite to hasten the day of its reconstruction."

Washington suggested that the group postpone its activities: they amounted to a criticism of the U.S. Army.

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