Suggest an Edit — Scholastica

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Biography

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Saint Scholastica is known almost exclusively through the account given by Pope Gregory the Great in Book II of his Dialogues, a work composed in Rome in the 590s on the basis of testimony Gregory claimed to have from disciples of Benedict. Gregory presents Scholastica as Benedict's sister, consecrated to Almighty God from her infancy. He does not call her a twin, name their parents, or give a birthplace or birth year. Later medieval and modern hagiography, followed throughout the Benedictine world, identifies her as Benedict's twin sister, born to a family of Roman provincial nobility at Nursia (present-day Norcia in Umbria) in the later fifth century. Those details are traditional rather than documented. What is secure is that she belonged to the same central-Italian Christian aristocracy as her brother and that her dedication to a life of virginity began in childhood, a practice attested among Italian elite families of the Ostrogothic period.

In adulthood she lived at the head of a small community of nuns a short distance from the mountain monastery of Monte Cassino. Gregory does not name the village; later Benedictine tradition places her house at Plombariola (Piumarola) in the valley below the abbey, some miles from Cassino. Because monastic custom forbade monks and nuns to enter one another's enclosures, brother and sister met once a year at a house near the monastery gate. They spent the day in the praise of God and in conversation on spiritual subjects. Scholastica is the earliest woman named in connection with the monastic movement associated with Benedict, and subsequent centuries regarded her as the foundress of Benedictine nuns, living under a discipline akin to her brother's Rule even if a fully formed female branch of the order is a later historical development.

Gregory's most famous chapter on her concerns their last earthly meeting. As evening drew on, Scholastica begged Benedict to remain until morning so that they might continue to speak of the joys of heaven. He refused, saying that he could not spend a night outside his monastery. She then lowered her head onto her hands upon the table and prayed. A sudden tempest of rain, thunder, and lightning burst over the house, so violent that neither Benedict nor his companions could set foot outdoors. He complained, asking what she had done. She replied that he would not listen to her petition, that she had asked the Lord, and that the Lord had heard her. They therefore remained together until morning in holy talk. Gregory draws the moral that she who loved more accomplished more, and that God is served not only by regular observance but by charity. The story became the principal iconographic type for Scholastica and the origin of her invocation against storms.

Three days after that visit, Benedict, looking out from his tower in prayer, saw his sister's soul departing her body and rising to heaven in the form of a dove. He sent monks to fetch her body to Monte Cassino and laid it in the tomb he had prepared for himself, so that death would not divide those whose minds had always been one in God. Gregory gives no calendar date or year. Liturgical tradition fixed her feast on 10 February, treated as her dies natalis, and many later writers assigned the death to the mid-sixth century, often to 543, a few years before the traditional date of Benedict's own death. The original burial was at Monte Cassino. After the Lombards sacked the abbey in the later sixth century, medieval accounts describe translations of relics, especially to Le Mans in Gaul; the rebuilt Monte Cassino continued to claim the common tomb of Benedict and Scholastica. Scholastica was not canonized by the formal papal process of later centuries. Her cult rests on Gregory's Dialogues, on the Roman Martyrology, and on uninterrupted Benedictine and wider Catholic and Orthodox veneration. She is honored as patron of Benedictine nuns and of nuns generally, of children afflicted with convulsions, and against rain and storms.

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