Abbot Romuald

Saint Romuald, founder of the Camaldolese congregation of Benedictine monks and hermits, was born in Ravenna in the middle of the tenth century into the noble Onesti family. His father, Duke Sergius of Ravenna, involved him in the violent aristocratic feuds of the age. According to the life written by Saint Peter Damian a few years after Romuald’s death, Sergius killed a kinsman in a duel over property, and Romuald, who had been compelled to be present, was so stricken with remorse that he withdrew to the nearby Benedictine abbey of Sant’Apollinare in Classe to perform a forty-day penance. The experience led him to take the monastic habit there, against his father’s wishes. Finding the observance at Classe insufficiently strict, he left after about three years and placed himself under the guidance of a Venetian hermit named Marinus, living an austere eremitical life in the region of Venice.

In the later tenth century Romuald was drawn into the circle of the reforming Doge Pietro I Orseolo, who abdicated in 978 and retired to monastic life; according to the hagiographical tradition Romuald accompanied him for a time, as far as a house in the Pyrenees. Thereafter he spent decades wandering through Italy as an itinerant reformer of monasteries and founder of hermitages, urging a return to primitive Benedictine and eremitical discipline. He served briefly as abbot of Sant’Apollinare in Classe at the request of the Emperor Otto III, but resigned when the community resisted his reforms. His apostolate of monastic restoration brought him into contact with both imperial and papal circles and with the spiritual currents that would later feed the eleventh-century reform of the Latin Church.

The foundation with which his name is permanently linked is Camaldoli, in the Casentino forests of the Tuscan Apennines near Arezzo. Tradition dates the establishment to the early eleventh century, often to 1012, on land associated with a donor named Maldolus; the name Camaldoli is explained as Campus Maldoli. There Romuald organized a double community: a cenobium for monks living in common and, higher on the mountain, a cluster of hermit cells. The Camaldolese thus united coenobitic and eremitical life under the Rule of Saint Benedict and adopted a distinctive white habit. A well-known legend, already present in medieval sources, recounts that Romuald saw a vision of a ladder reaching to heaven, with monks in white ascending it. He continued to found or reform other houses, among them the monastery of Val di Castro in the Marche.

He died at Val di Castro on 19 June 1027. His body was later translated to Fabriano, where the relics are venerated in the church of Saints Blaise and Romuald. The principal ancient source for his life remains the Vita Beati Romualdi composed by Peter Damian, himself a Camaldolese hermit and later cardinal-bishop of Ostia, around 1042. Romuald’s cult accompanied the spread of his congregation; his feast was entered in the General Roman Calendar in the late sixteenth century under Pope Clement VIII. From 1595 until the calendar reform of 1969 it was kept on 7 February; it is now observed on 19 June, the day of his death. He is remembered as a principal architect of eremitical renewal in the Latin West on the eve of the Gregorian Reform.