Rule of St. Benedict, Chapters 20-30
BOOK CLUB 1 | WEEK 2: Discipline, Punishment, and Restoration to Community
As a reminder, you can access the text of St. Benedict’s Rule here. If you’d like to visit the Book Club table of contents, you can do so here. Full disclosure, I wanted to be more detailed in this post, but the last ten days or so have gotten away from me.
This week’s reading covers a few miscellaneous topics before diving into an extended discussion of discipline, punishment, and restoration within the monastic community. Rather than going chapter-by-chapter like we did last week, I’ll try to offer one longer, cohesive essay that covers everything discussed in Chapters 23-30.
However, before diving into that discussion, let’s say a few words about Chapters 20-22. These chapters are excellent examples of the minute care St. Benedict clearly has for his monastery - he wants to ensure that the monks’ genuine physical and spiritual needs are taken care of without reducing the asceticism of their lifestyle; however, he also recognizes that “the devil is in the details” and that these little areas could be opportunities for monks to lapse in their fidelity to the spirit of the Rule. We want to be similarly careful for and attentive to the needs of our families.
Chapter 20: Concerning reverence in prayer
St. Benedict is trying to say here that we ought to focus on the nature of prayer and the necessarily humility before the Lord, rather than focusing on absolute precision in our requests, making demands of the Lord, attempts to justify ourselves, etc. This makes me think of the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee. The former is lauded for his prayer, which is humble, concise, and sincere. The latter, on the other hand, was prideful, verbose, and (one could argue) performative in his prayer, and the Lord made it clear that this was an inappropriate and unacceptable spiritual posture for disciples. Thus, like St. Benedict and his monks, let us strive to be humble, concise, and sincere in our prayer, especially in our “public” or family prayers.
This brevity and humility serve an added benefit or purpose in families with young children. Teaching toddlers to pray involves two principles: First, we must acknowledge that toddlers will not know how to pray if we do not model/instruct them vocally. Second, however, we must remember that the attention span of the average toddler is short, and even the most effective toy or manipulative won’t lengthen it by much.
Thus, when teaching our children to pray, we have to navigate the tension between these two principles. Of course we want to teach them their basic “rote” prayers. And beyond that, we want to take the time to show them, for example, what it means to intercede for the intentions of our families and loved ones. What it means to examine our conscience and ask for forgiveness for our sins. What it means to praise God for His goodness and the way it is manifested in our lives. But we also can’t take too long, or we’ll lose them. “And so,” we parents can say with St. Benedict, “our prayer should be pure and short, unless haply it be prolonged as a result of the infusion of divine grace.” As our children grow, their interest and understanding will deepen, and their attention spans will lengthen - in other words, there will (God-willing) be time later for lengthier or more intimate teaching to pray.
How can we focus on purifying our prayers so that they are short and effective both as prayers and as teaching opportunities? Obviously, this is going to look different from family to family. I’ll share two examples below, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments - either your experiences as a child, or your experiences as a parent.
In our family, we (mom, dad, 2yo, 3mo) offer short “goodnighttime prayers” each evening. Well, most evenings. This includes a few rote prayers (Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Angel of God - pretty standard), followed by thanking God for blessings in our day, prayer intentions, and a short litany of family patron saints. Our hope is that as our daughters get older, they will be more able to participate in leading the memorized prayers, as well as offering their own prayers of gratitude and intercession. We also want them to have words and habits of praying from their hearts, more than simply reciting prayers from memory, so that they can build on that foundation as they come into their own. Our goal is that, as we get into a routine during the upcoming school year, we will add a more consistent morning prayer and a noon Angelus. Ideally, in the mornings, we would say a Morning Offering, perhaps the Three Hail Marys devotion, and St. Claude’s Act of Consecration. We are still working towards that goal. And for the Angelus, we love to sing it; although, our toddler frequently demands the Regina Caeli (Allulah song) before we even get to the first Hail Mary. Growing pains.
I’ll also share an example here from a subscriber who isn’t on the Substack app (and thus won’t be commenting) - she and her husband regularly lead their two children (age 4 and 2) in a nightly decade of the rosary. Each child has an age-appropriate book that they can hold while they pray. (I’ve also seen rosary boards, rosary pop-its, and rosary chew toys - and of course, any set of ten things can serve as a manipulative rosary for a young child, no purchase of yet another thing necessary). The four of them (and any houseguests who are praying with them) rotate off who leads the first half of a Hail Mary, so the kids are kept engaged throughout by the changing of voices and their own responsibility of leading two or three prayers. They, likewise, are not consistent with every night - although that is their goal - but it is amazing to me how a predictable expectation of what prayer time looks like can facilitate this kind of participation.
Ultimately, this comes back to knowing our individual families and the capacity of each member - we want to encourage one another and call one another higher without setting our expectations so high that they are unattainable, which will only lead to frustration and discouragement.
Chapter 21: Concerning the deans of the monastery
This is another chapter in which our discussions of authority and subsidiarity come back into play. While we likely won’t have deans as such in our families, there are certainly areas where we can delegate authority to older children, grandparents, or friends. I love what St. Benedict offers as a guide to choosing such mid-level authorities:
[A]nd let them not be chosen by seniority, but for meritorious life and soundness of wisdom.
In other words, we are to pay attention first - perhaps even only - to personal sanctity, rather than seniority, relationship, possibility of causing offense, or other considerations. This mindset can impact how we discern our children’s godparents, which can be a hard thing to do when every aunt and uncle feels entitled to this role at some point! We can similarly apply this criteria when we ask older children to assist with younger siblings - getting dressed, basic hygiene, etc. - or when we decide whether to hire a babysitter or leave an oldest sibling in charge.
Chapter 22: How the monks are to sleep
I love this chapter because I’m a big big fan of sleep hygiene. Before our children were born, I knew the basics - circadian rhythms, don’t use screens before bed, bananas make you sleepy, yada yada yada - but I wasn’t aware quite how much our sleep quality could be affected by small decisions and habits. When we got hit by our first four month sleep regression, I did a ton of research into sleep “training” versus sleep “learning” versus sleep “doing whatever you need to do to get through the night”. Now I have a lot of strong opinions loosely held about ways in which we can set our families up for sleep success (and the subsequent improvements in mood and happiness and virtue that often accompany a good night’s sleep). So the fact that Benedict includes an entire chapter in the Rule on sleep hygiene is very endearing.
As we’ve come to expect, the specifics of the Rule may or may not apply to our families - we likely won’t have ten or twenty children sleeping in the same room - but we can draw out principles that will benefit us. I’ll offer a short list here:
Sleep Clothed - I see this as almost an issue of modesty, as even within the family context, covering our intimate parts in a “public” context supports appropriate boundaries, virtue, and healthy expectations.
You have to chuckle with me because our toddler is in the “I know how to take my clothes off so now I just strip down to my birthday suit for fun” phase
No Knives - We can extrapolate from this that we shouldn’t be bringing things to bed that would “harm a sleeper” or disrupt sleep. Namely, you guessed it, phones or screens generally. Depending on the family member, this might also include distracting toys or scary books that tend to keep children up/
I am bad at this one and often find myself grabbing my phone on my way to bed, either without thinking about it or worse, knowing it’s unnecessary or imprudent and doing it anyway.1
Arise Promptly - We can (should?) cultivate a habit of getting up immediately upon being summoned (whether by our alarm or by another family member), as opposed to snoozing the alarm. There is virtue in this small mortification, and we don’t run the risk of accidentally neglecting other duties.
This one can be so difficult if you tend to sleep deeply, or if you’re in a season of sleep deprivation where even two more minutes seems like the only thing that will get you through the day.
Room Sharing - Depending on the specific circumstances of your family, having kids share a room might be a necessity, a privilege for them, or a nightmare to be avoided. But when circumstances allow it, room sharing can promote sibling bonding, encourage cleanliness and mutual accountability/responsibility, and limit excessive withdrawal from the family’s shared life (I don’t mean “alone time” so much as “I don’t want to talk to you fools” time).
My mom swears that, when my brother and I were little, putting us in the same room solved all our bedtime drama, until we got big enough to want our own space.
I’d like to add one thought to the room sharing element of this chapter, because I think it hints at a greater dynamic within families, which is accountability and responsibility for one another. How can we create a culture where our children take responsibility for one another’s well-being without feeling burdened or “shackled down” by their siblings? Is there a way we can acknowledge and lean into our interdependence as members of the same family/household?
Chapters 23-30: Excommunication, punishment, and restoration to community
Here’s where we get to the real meat of this week’s reading. Benedict spends a lot of time here talking about the function and functioning of punishment in the monastery, and I think we as parents can learn a lot from his principles.
The primary punishments noted in the Rule are admonishment in private or in public, excommunication, and “the discipline of the Rule”.2 Excommunication, I think it’s important to clarify, refers to excommunication from the monastic community (as opposed to excommunication from the Church, a canonical penalty with important repercussions/implications), and there are varying degrees, such as exclusion from the common table, from the oratory, and solitary work. “The discipline”, I have been led to believe by our former-Benedictine-turned-music-teacher neighbor, refers to some form of corporal punishment.
I also want to address the way in which, even this early in the life of the Church, we see the beginnings of what has become the Church’s teaching on the ends of punishment:
“The purposes of criminal punishment are rather unanimously delineated in the Catholic tradition. Punishment is held to have a variety of ends that may conveniently be reduced to the following four: rehabilitation, defense against the criminal, deterrence, and retribution.”3
Rehabilitation: Restoring the offender to society as a healthy and functional individual
Defense against the criminal: Protecting the society from the offender or future offenses
Deterrence: Preventing the offender from committing the same offense again
Retribution: Receiving what is due and/or repaying the debt incurred by the offense
In other words, punishment has a purpose. Punishment serves the good of the individual and of the society as a whole, so it ought to be rationally chosen in a moment of calm. The more we choose and impose punishments as an extension of our anger of frustration in the moment, the less effective (and the less sanctifying) those punishments will be. Perhaps we, like St. Benedict, can lay out the skeleton of a disciplinary system that outlines punishments appropriate to the age of the child and the offense committed - something we can fall back to maintain consistency for ourselves and our children. By seeing punishment as ordered toward the good of both the individual and the wider community, we will be less likely to choose overly-severe, anger-driven punishments, as well as those that are overly lax and driven by our own apathy or acedia.
We see constant allusion to rehabilitation throughout this section. In fact, I would argue that excommunication is fundamentally ordered toward rehabilitation. In other words, the purpose of removing someone from the community is to bring awareness to their desire to be part of the community. While participation in the life of the community is not the goal to be pursued above all else, community is a good and natural human desire, and we can channel that desire to encourage members of the community to greater holiness. Benedict’s instruction that the abbot pray ceaselessly for those who have been excommunicated can remind us to constantly bring our children to the Lord, even in times of trouble
In a monastic community, barring violent crimes that would obviously endanger the lives of the monks, the primary defense of the community is spiritual, mainly in the form of scandal. While our families may be exposed to greater physical or emotional danger, we ought also to carefully protect against scandal within our homes. For Benedict, this included a prohibition against talking to excommunicated monks, so as to avoid the appearance that their offense had been forgiven without restitution being made, or minimizing the effect of their offense. For our families, this might also include screening the media to which our children are exposed, guiding conversations so that potentially problematic topics are discussed in age-appropriate ways, and teaching our children to be prudent in their friendships and relationships.
When it comes to deterring future offenses, there are two primary ways to accomplish this: removing the means of committing the offense, and making the consequences of the offense inconvenient or distasteful enough that the offense is not worth it. Thus, punishment serves not only to avoid scandal, but also to impress upon the offender (and on the wider community) the gravity of the offense, which we hope and pray will eventually lead to a development of true virtue. In our homes, this might look like limiting screen time or screen location, limiting purchase of sweets (guilty),
Finally, on the matter of retribution, we see Benedict advising the abbot to use his discretion regarding what punishment is appropriate for what offenses. This is also where he advocates for special consideration to be given to young men or other monks in unique situations, for whom the standard punishment may not serve the above goals. In our families, there will often be a wide range of maturity - and, consequently, of expectations - between the older and younger children, so punishments for the same offense might look different for different children.
Throughout this section, we see Benedict addressing particular situations, offering advice and instruction to the abbots and the members of the monasteries, but each particular situation is oriented to at least one of the four ends of punishment. Ultimately, it is up to us as parents to decide what offenses in our families merit what degree of punishment, but we can certainly find in the Rule a sound template from which to begin our discernment.
A quick poll!
Questions for Consideration and Discussion
Families with older children or teens/young adults, what does your family prayer routine look like? And for those who are not currently married, do you have moments from your childhood that stick out as foundational experiences of family prayer? Do you have goals for your own family one day?
Parents of children who have reached the age of reason - how have you seen holiness and piety developing in your families?
What routines, habits, or “hygiene” tasks do you have in place around sleep in your home, if any? What is one thing you can do this week to improve your sleep hygiene? If you slept better - and had more energy and/or a greater disposition to virtue as a result - what benefit do you think you would see? In other words, what are you holding back from because of tiredness?
How has your family (either you as a parent or your family of origin) handled punishment? Have you noticed an ordering to any of the four ends of punishment?
I really like the idea of relegating technology to common areas only. Someone mentioned to me recently the idea of creating a “screens drawer” where phones, latops, tablets, etc. can be safely stored and periodically accessed. Obviously the issue of anxious attachment, unhealthy dependence on, or overt addiction to screens is a WHOLE other topic.
We see here a reference to Matthew 18:15-17 (ESV quoted here):
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
I pulled this quote from this article from Avery Cardinal Dulles for First Things back in 2001. The article is discussing specifically capital punishment, but his discussion of the four ends of punishment is insightful nonetheless. See also Evangelium vitae no. 56 and Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 2266.