Monastere Saint Benoit

06/09/2026

A Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ In the middle of the demands of each day, on Sundays as well as on ferias other than in the privileged liturgical seasons, the Monastic Office of Sext repeats ten words from the Epistle of this Holy Mass: Alter alterius onera portate, et sic adimplebitis legem Christi. (Carry one another’s burdens and thus fulfil the law of Christ.) Monks hear this injunction of St Paul hundreds of times a year—many thousands of times over a lifetime.

In repeating this injunction so frequently the Church’s Sacred Liturgy seeks to wear down and round-off the rough edges of our unconverted selves by allowing the Truth (in this case as taught by Saint Paul) to wash over us continually and wear away all that resists its force. So too, as a wise mother, the Church knows that—even (especially!)—in monasteries we need reminding of the evangelical duty to carry each other’s burdens. Benedictine monks are not hermits: they belong to a monastic family, and as we all know, families can be functional or dysfunctional, and in order to avoid the latter it is necessary to remember our duty towards its other members.

Of course, the Monastic Office is not the sole property of monks and nuns: it is one treasure of the Church’s rich liturgical tradition from which, very rightly, many lay men and women (especially monastic oblates) draw at least something each day. For in the world, as in the enclosure, we all need to return to the fundamental truths taught by the Gospels and by the Apostles, and the proclamation of very short excerpts from Sacred Scripture throughout the Divine Office serves this end most appositely.

However, let us not become protestant in our approach. The singing or praying of the psalms and other texts of the Divine Office (or of any other liturgical rite) is not primarily done for our instruction or edification. It is not ‘Bible reading’ or some form of study. No. All liturgical rites are first and foremost our placing of ourselves before Almighty God in order to render unto Him the worship that is His due as His creatures.

That, when we dispose ourselves before Almighty God in order to worship Him, we find ourselves instructed—or better, we are formed or re-formed according to God’s ways—and we are edified—we are literally built up—should surprise no one, even as its reality may continue to astonish us. For in humbling ourselves before God and by giving ourselves to Him in worship, we encounter Him in a most singularly privileged way.

Indeed, a recent Ecumenical Council of the Church went so far as to say, and very rightly, “that every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the priest and of His Body which is the Church, is a sacred action surpassing all others; no other action of the Church can equal its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree.” (Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7) This applies just as much to a small group of monks singing the little hours of the Office as it does to great papal and pontifical ceremonies, and indeed, to a priest’s necessarily private Mass, or to laypeople praying the Divine Office by themselves. When we worship God according to the sacred rites of His Church we are opening ourselves in the most efficacious way possible to His grace, partially because the rites themselves do form and instruct us, but also because the very act of worshipping God itself opens our hearts, minds and souls to the action of His grace within us.

And let us not think for one moment that God does not wish to take the opportunity to fill us with His grace and power and healing. For what else does this morning’s Gospel teach us other than that Jesus Christ, the definitive revelation of God in human history, has pity on us in our sorrow and distress just as He had pity on the widow of Naim? His words noli flere—do not weep—are spoken to each of us by His Church this morning no matter what be the cause of our grief. Through the Sacred Liturgy of His Church, most particularly through the Sacraments of Baptism, Confession and Extreme Unction (the Anointing of the Sick), Our Lord continues to raise those amongst us who have been dead to sin to new and everlasting life.

It could perhaps be objected that the Widow of Naim made no request of Our Lord; that seemingly she had no faith in Him, etc. It could almost be said that Our Lord seemed to intrude himself on her grief. But this would be to ignore two utterly profound realities which the Sacred Text does convey. The first is that the mother was clearly weeping in her grief. St Benedict enjoins his monks to pray “with tears and fervour of heart” (Rule, ch. 52) Tears that are worth the shedding are, in reality, a most efficacious form of prayer.

The second is that compassion is of the very nature of God as revealed in the Person of His Incarnate Son. Christ became man out of love for mankind—a love that St Paul’s injunction Alter alterius onera portate, et sic adimplebitis legem Christi reminds us that we are bound to emulate. Let us ask for the grace so to do, then, as we turn to the altar in worship of He Who, out of sacrificial love, has already carried all our burdens to Calvary. +

30/08/2026

A Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ Greatly are the things of the earth contrasted against those of heaven throughout the course of the propers of this Holy Mass. Yet in each of those contrasts there is a new nuance which adds to the whole. Never is there an outright condemnation of material things, but various levels of treatment in which they are shown to be inferior to the spiritual. Receiving the integral picture requires stepping back and examining what manner the hyperbole of the given image is being addressed to us. Yet it is the integration of everything which must genuinely be lived to acquire and develop the virtues which God expects of us.

Christ’s preaching has a practical application which is terribly difficult. You cannot serve both God and mammon, you either love the one and hate the other or serve one and despise the other. Yet this is not a direct statement that it is not possible to receive both. Only that we cannot seek after both with all of our heart. Each of us is often given this choice of what is going to be served; my personal interest or God. It matters not what that lust may be, power, money, or liberty to do exactly as I please when it pleases me. It is only in searching for these things regardless of the demands of justice and responsibility that these become destructive.

In continuing the Gospel passage Christ makes this distinction much clearer. The bird who does not sow and gather does not run short of food; not even Solomon has such fine garments as the lilies of the field which do not weave. God will make these things available to you as you have need of them. Justice is the one thing which Our Lord puts before us as that which must be actively sought out. Even if it is to leave us in apparent hardship, nothing can be put before that good of justice. If the flowers have their beauty in appearance, man has his beauty through his proximity to God through virtue, especially the theological virtues of faith hope and charity. Whilst only the one virtue is quoted, Our Lord uses it to envisage the complete set. Whilst material concerns are easy to use as an excuse before which we can apparently avoid works of virtue, they are rarely adequate. Our Lord is perfectly clear that what is necessary will be received, as long as we first seek God.

One of the most fundamental means in which that justice must be served by is to assure that the truth, the sacraments, and the rites of the church are faithfully handed down and made available as widely as possible. At a temporal level the introit can be understood as referring to the sacred liturgy. “One day in your courts are better than a thousand elsewhere.” It is better to spend a brief time in the contemplation of God, in the living of the Church’s rites, than in many other frivolous activities. Those things which are given us by God are of a vastly greater worth than anything else. All the faithful have a right to the full rites of the Church. So often it is forgotten that this goes far beyond the celebration of Mass. In particular assistance at the office of Sunday Vespers is a salutary practice for the sanctification of the Sunday. It can never however replace Sunday Mass.

Having celebrated on Friday the feast of St Augustine it is becoming to dwell on his example. He stands as the greatest of all doctors of the Church upon whose writings almost all later theology ultimately depends. At the end of his life the Roman empire was collapsing and being taken over by various Germanic tribes. He ever held fast to his place as bishop to ensure that he could bring to his flock in Hippo the sacred food as best he could. He engages the politics surrounding him only insofar as it was directly useful to the care of the souls entrusted to him or required of him as bishop. His wisdom and teaching was sought after from afar both because of his learning and, more importantly, because of his authentic simplicity in searching for God. Never did he allow any of his numerous preoccupations to interrupt his simple living of the Gospel, rather he allowed it to drive him to fulfil the Gospel precepts more perfectly. +

25/08/2026

Tout le monde est le bienvenu !

23/08/2026

A Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ Leprosy, thanks to scientists’ diligent use of their God-given gifts, is now curable and is no longer a condemnation to a lifetime of social exclusion and physical suffering and degradation. But this was not at all the case when Our Lord cured the ten lepers as related in this morning’s Gospel. Their suffering was not temporary: their condition excluded them from society inflicting public humiliation on top of the dire physical consequences that the progress of the disease itself entailed. It is no wonder, then, that Our Lord wondered with disbelief that only one of the ten came back to render thanks for the monumental healing He had occasioned. But only one out of ten returned. It is perhaps one of the saddest episodes of the Gospel.

Before God became Man in Jesus the Christ and suffered and died on the Cross as the perfect sacrifice for our sins, and rose gloriously from the dead, the leprosy of sin—which brings destruction that, if not cured, endures beyond death for all eternity—had no cure. Those infected had no certain hope. There was no end to its effects, nor was there a foreseeable cure. Not, that is, until—as the Gospel of St John insists— “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Rightly do we bend our knees when we hear these words: they announce the coming of Hope Himself, who offers to all who believe in Him healing from sin—a gift far greater than the physical healing given to the ten.

We live in a world which will do anything and everything to avoid physical suffering and death, as we saw only too well in the now discredited but highly orchestrated worldwide shutdown of life as we know it under the banner Covid 19, including the social exclusion, indeed the excommunication, of the ‘new lepers’ who refused to subscribe to the doctrine of salvation by vaccination.

It is important never to forget this, nor indeed that high officials in the Church herself thus subscribed and even went as far as to impose this false doctrine upon others, whilst zealously forbidding the worship of Almighty God and the administration of the sacraments—forbidding, that is the administration of the cure for which Our Lord Jesus Christ became man. Not only do we live in a world where physical suffering and death are the only thing to be avoided (as if, in the end, that is possible!), but we must face the fact that this mundane cancer has spread throughout the Church herself. Prelates preen themselves before mirror of the world whilst the leprosy that is sin is ignored in servile subservience to the agendas dictated by the potentates of this world.

It is even more important that we never forget the teaching of the Letter to the Hebrews that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come.” (Heb. 13:14) Rightly do we seek to heal disease and alleviate suffering. Justly do we care for the frail and the elderly and afford them the dignity of a good and natural death. Society may reasonably require proportionate measures to prevent the spread of disease. Our Lord did cleanse the leprosy of the ten. But physical health is not an end in itself. Physical health is a good ordered, as this morning’s Gospel teaches, to the worship of Almighty God. It is given to us, or restored to us, so that we can more ably progress towards the eternal city, the “city which is to come.”

Such progress is made, of course, by seeking the healing of the leprosy with which our sins have infected us and are gradually eating away at our very being—by seeking Baptism if we are not baptised, or if we are, by going and showing ourselves and the state of our souls to the priest in the just and merciful tribunal of the Sacrament of Confession. For in these great sacraments we encounter He who became man for our salvation; He who suffered and died on the Cross out of infinite love for each one of us so that we might share in the victory over sin and death made manifest by His glorious resurrection. He waits for us to turn to Him and ask to be cleansed so that we may enjoy a healing of far greater importance than that of the ten lepers.

Thus healed our place is here, before the Lord in humble worship and thanksgiving for the graces we have so freely been given. Let us never forget that, as did the nine who failed to return to give thanks. For theirs was not simple ingratitude, it was a denial of all that was due, a refusal to take their rightful place. As any monk comes to know, it is simply right, it is as it should be, to sing the praises of God seven times a day and once at night (even on very cold mornings!) because of God’s mercy. (cf. Ps. 118: 62;164)

Our Holy Mother the Church does not require this of all her children. She simply insists that all are present at Mass—at the Offering of the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, that is of thanksgiving—each and every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation. Even in respect of this minimal requirement we might well ask: “Where are the other nine?” As we offer this Holy Sacrifice this morning, let us pray for our absent brothers and sisters in particular, that they too may take their rightful and due place here, before the Lord, in humble adoration for all that He has given us. +

22/08/2026

Recent refectory reading: https://osjustipress.com/products/liturgical-travels-through-france?_pos=1&_psq=liturgical+travels&_psid=bdccdda30&_ss=e

Informative, entertaining and instructive: this new and expert translation does much to illustrate the breadth and riches of liturgical tradition that survived in France until the French Revolution, even as some of what is recounted may now necessarily belong to the past.

“The arguments for monarchy are basically of three kinds: providentialist—monarchy has been the state form most used by the providence of God to further the Christianization of peoples; sacramental—monarchy permits the symbolic clothing of civil authority with the mantle of Christ the Servant-...

17/08/2026

Fr Prior recently gave an interview about the Monastery to the news site AdVaticanum:
https://advaticanum.com/article/quantum-potes-tantum-aude-dare-to-do-as-much-as-you-can-an-interview-with-dom-alcuin-reid/
Un résumé en français (ainsi qu'en italien, espagnol, allemand et portugais) a été publié ici : https://infovaticana.com/fr/2026/08/17/dom-alcuin-reid-la-reforme-liturgique-est-allee-au-dela-de-ce-qui-etait-etabli-par-vatican-ii/

Dom Alcuin Reid, fondateur et prieur du Monastère Saint-Benoît de Provence, a affirmé que la réforme liturgique appliquée après le Concile Vatican II est allée au-delà de ce qui était établi par Sacrosanctum Concilium et a défendu que la liturgie…

16/08/2026

A Homily for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

+ In this life Christians are by no means exempt from temptation and suffering. We experience the trials and difficulties and limitations of human existence as do our non-believing contemporaries—perhaps even more so as see Truth increasingly relativised and morality descend ever further into base subjective utilitarianism, most particularly in questions of human anthropology—the true nature of human persons, of sexuality and of the family—the respect and protection that is due to innocent human life from conception until the moment of natural death. Faced with a landslide of immorality on all sides, we rightly cry out with the Psalmist (as we do each Thursday at Prime): Usquequo, Domine…? “How long, O LORD? Wilt thou forget me for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Ps. 12:1-2) We seem ever to be fighting a losing battle…

Yet, suffer as we do, through her Sacred Liturgy our Holy Mother the Church addresses these words of Our Lord Jesus Christ to each one of us this morning: “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”

Let us ponder this a little. Historically these words of Our Lord underlined the unique privilege His hearers enjoyed: of being face to face with the definitive revelation of God in human history and of hearing His teaching in person—something that most certainly many prophets and kings desired to hear and to see, but did not. Perhaps those who first heard these words did not quite understand their import: they carry an enormous and quite singular assertation, one that even the most devout would find difficult, if not scandalous to accept: that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God, the Saviour of all mankind.

Our Lord’s hearers did not have the benefit of His resurrection from the dead to ‘prove’ His identity, as it were. But we do. And we have the witness of the Apostles’ deaths as martyrs out of complete conviction that Jesus is the Christ of God. So too we have centuries of further martyrs and saints who lived this Truth amidst disintegrated social orders and persecution, all the while bearing the ordinary limitations and sufferings of human existence. They lived this Truth and they persevered unto the end in it, sometimes offering their blood as witnesses to it. In spite of any and every obstacle that was placed before them, they knew and lived from the reality that they were truly blessed beyond any care or worry to know Jesus Christ and to encounter Him living and acting in the One True Church He founded. Even more so, perhaps, than those who first heard the words of this morning’s Gospel, they knew that, when participating in the Sacred Liturgy, their eyes were blessed to see what they saw, and to hear what they heard—so much so that they could never renounce He whom they thus encountered.

This is—or should be—where we stand: here, as members of the Church, encountering Christ anew every Sunday here in the Sacred Liturgy of His Church, speaking to us through the inspired words of Sacred Scripture and coming to us in the most sublime manner possible through the most holy sacrifice of the Mass. Despite our wounds, limitations and sins, despite any form of persecution—be that by the gods worshipped by secular society, or be that from ecclesiastical ideologues who have fashioned their own gods—we are truly blessed, because here we taste and see what many prophets and kings desired but never knew: the saving love and mercy of Jesus, the Christ of God.

This singular grace is a privilege given by God for our salvation. We must cooperate with this gift and use it wisely. Indeed, the Parable of the Talents (Mt 25:14-30) teaches us that we must make good and profitable use of this great gift. It is not given for some form of miserly or gnostic self-satisfaction. No. In His Providence Almighty God has allowed us to be thus blessed in order that we might be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. (cf. Is 52:10) We are called not to sit contentedly guarding our privilege, but to make disciples of all nations (cf. Mt. 28:19), nothing less.

The Gradual of this Holy Mass appositely sings: Benedicam Dominum in omni tempore; semper laus ejus in ore meo. (I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall always be on my lips.) Appositely, the monastic office places these words of the Psalmist on the lips of each monk in the responsory of daily ferial vespers. For whatever burdens we carry to choir—our own, or those of our oblates and associates and friends and benefactors—our vocation is indeed to bless the Lord at all times, in any and every circumstance. We may endure great trials and our suffering may seem to be unbearable, but by the grace of our baptism we can and must seek to make the prayer of Job our own: “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:21)

Let us bless the Lord, then, as we approach His altar of Sacrifice. And let us be confident that in so doing we shall receive the grace of perseverance in fidelity to His ways that has been given to so many before us for their salvation and for the salvation of others. Benedicam Dominum in omni tempore! +

15/08/2026

Mass and Procession for the Feast of the Assumption

14/08/2026

The monastery church is a house of prayer and we are always very happy when people from around the world request a candle to be lit for their particular intentions in front of our statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Holy Father St Benedict, St Christopher (the medieval dedication of our church) or Blessed Ildephonse Schuster (our secondary patron). Each candle adds its intentions to the round of offices and Masses sung daily in the church, bearing witness to our union in prayer and intercession for the Church and the world.

To light a candle in the monastery church:

10/08/2026

Notre lettre aux amis pour le temps après la Pentecôte 2026
​est maintenant publiée sur notre site web:https://www.monasterebrignoles.org/uploads/4/6/9/0/4690473/monast%C3%A8re_saint-beno%C3%AEt_-_newsletter_-_time_after_pentecost_2026.pdf
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Our Time after Pentecost 2026 newsletter is now published on our website:https://www.monasterebrignoles.org/uploads/4/6/9/0/4690473/monast%C3%A8re_saint-beno%C3%AEt_-_newsletter_-_time_after_pentecost_2026.pdf