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Introduction to the Oblates of St. Benedict

(Given at St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul Minnesota by Thomas Allen, OSB)

Within the last decade, various religious, quasi-religious, and personal growth movements have been springing up throughout the land:  the charismatic movement, transactional analysis, transcendental meditation, the prayer of centering.  All of these signal a widely felt need for vital prayer or personal transformation.  Apparently many persons are attracted to these because they have not found sufficient help in the liturgy of the Church.  Perhaps even some of the dissatisfaction results from the vacuum created by de-emphasis  on special devotions such as the nine first Fridays, public novenas, Forty Hour Devotion.  The church did not intend to abolish devotions but rather to place them in proper perspective, yet many of them have abandoned with nothing much to replace them.  Vatican II has in fact endorsed these but urged that they be related to the church's liturgy.

Helps for prayer, spiritual growth and experience of the transcendental lie within  a vital liturgical life.  These can be mediated to some person with considerable satisfaction by a means little known yet available to some extent, namely the Benedictine oblate movement.  By this means fragmented lives can be integrated into a a simple kind of dedication marked by worship and fraternity.  Besides, the spiritual hunger of our times, another call for the Benedictine oblate movement lies in the emphasis on the laity and their summons to holiness made clear by Vatican Council III.  The document on the Church plainly enunciated the call of the whole church of holiness. Furthermore, the decree on the apostolate of the laity points out that lay persons share in "the priestly, prophetic, and royal office of Christ" and are to help build up the body of Christ.  In this body, which is the Church, the various parts are intimately linked and interrelated: speaking directly of the responsibility of laity, this decree reads:

"The exercise a genuine apostolate by their activity on behalf of bringing the gospel and holiness to all, and on behalf of penetrating and perfecting the temporal sphere of things through the spirit of the gospel.  On this way, their temporal activity can openly bear witness to Christ and promote the salvation of God's people.  Since proper to the laity's it is state in life to spend days in the midst of the world and of secular transactions, all are called by God to burn with the spirit of Christ and to exercise their apostolate in the world as a kind of leaven."

Most Catholics are willing to take part in the apostolate of the Church but many are at a loss as to how to go about it.  Some need a further structure to help them direct their personal lives, implement this participation and thus grow in that holiness to which they are called.  The Benedictine oblate movement can provide such a basic structure, which allows for varied lines of development.  This movement seems to be one appropriate response to Vatican II.  It seems also to have much to offer for today's world, which is hungering for those gospel values particularly promoted by the Rule of St. Benedict; i.e. reverence, sensitivity, peace.

However, the oblates are not well known, and it is for this reason that these reflections are offered here on the nature, history and current status of the movement.