Have we forgotten what Europe owes to Benedict of Nursia, this monk who founded in the sixthe century the order that will bear his name, the Benedictines, and whose rule is obedience, humility and a spirit of silence?
But he is also the patron saint of Europe, and in the eyes of Paolo Rumiz, it is much more than an anecdote. Something like a carte blanche and the opportunity to go in search of principles which, today, seem to him to be on the way out. For ten years, the writer has accustomed us to his meandering itineraries, he who most of the time travels through Europe, its mountains, its valleys and its borders.
Born in Trieste in 1947, star journalist of the daily La Repubblica and specialist in the Balkans, he notably covered all the conflicts that shook the former Yugoslavia. As a travel writer, he crossed the mountains in search of the passage of Hannibal (Hannibal’s Shadow2012), descended the course of the Po in Italy (Po, the romance of a river2014) or measured the borders of Europe (At the borders of Europe2011), from the beaches of Odessa to the frozen pebbles of the Arctic.
In the ruins of Norcia, in April 2017, after the earthquake that hit this Apennine village hard in August 2016, a statue of Saint Benedict, intact, right arm raised “as if to indicate something halfway between the heaven and earth”, had made a strong impression on him. A presence reminding him that at the fall of the Roman Empire, the order of Benedictine monks had somehow saved Europe.
But today’s Europe is also in danger. “Never in history,” he wrote in The endless thread, we haven’t had so many problems in common, and yet here Europe, instead of coming together, is bickering, erecting barbed wire, dividing, calling democracy into question. She ignores her own roots. She forgets that she is the land of rules. »
These scattered monasteries form a network of exemplary solidarity and devotion that it seems to him urgent to recall. Because for Rumiz, disaster awaits the Europeans, the “return of national selfishness announced a balkanization in progress on a continental scale”.
Out of a need for solitude, retirement, silence, Paolo Rumiz will thus trace an exciting spiritual itinerary “outside the maps”, weaving from one abbey to another a kind of humanist thread, made of encounters and stories. — both washed down sometimes with a few abbey beers. Praglia in Veneto. Muri-Gries and Marienberg in South Tyrol. St. Gallen, Switzerland. Cîteaux and Saint-Wandrille, in France. Orval, Belgium.
Who knows that the Benedictines already wanted a first European supranational parliament as early as 1115, a century before the Magna Carta Libertatum of John without Land? At its height towards the end of the twelfthe century, the Benedictine order had 100,000 monasteries in Europe…
Book of fire and faith (secular), The endless thread does not hide its mission of political combat, even though the European Union, according to Paolo Rumiz, is falling into a trap set from abroad.