Since there are those who persist in deriding the Dimond Brothers as "Fred and Bob", denying them the respect owed to religious Brothers, and I have had to repeatedly debunk these assertions, I want to put all the information in this thread. Let's be honest. Those who refer to them disrespectfully as "Fred and Bob" are not doing so out of principle but due to the contempt they have for the positions taken by the Dimond Brothers or other personal animosity. During the lawsuit brought against them by Eric Hoyle, the Conciliar Benedictines (the chapter in Rome) admitted that all those who professed to live by the Rule of St. Benedict can truly be called Benedictines. I was not aware of this prior to that point. Lest this be dismissed as yet another Conciliar innovation, I read up on the Benedictine "Order" (a term loosely applied to them) from The Catholic Encyclopedia, which then confirmed this notion of the Benedictine. These same detractors of the Dimond Brothers would never dare call CMRI Sisters "Beth and Marge", or the Daughters of Mary (SSPV) or even from the religious groups affiliated with SSPX. Traditional Catholics do not have any canonically regular religious orders period. And yet these detractors single out the Dimond Brothers for such treatment. But it's actually the structure and nature of the Benedictine Order that actually makes their claims stand up even more strongly than those of these other groups. So the Dimond Brothers emphasize that they were established by a former Benedictine Brother Joseph Natale, but even this is not necessary in order to become a Benedictine house. This was, nevertheless, how Benedictine monasticism has always spread historically, where a Brother or Brothers venture out to form their own variation that's more suited to their needs. Some houses were more austere, others less so. St. Benedict always envisioned that his rule would be adapted to the needs and circuмstances of individual groups. Brother Joseph Natale initially set out to found a house that was more suited towards men with various disabilities, and this type of expansion and spreading of the Benedictine houses was actually the rule rather than the exception. Benedictines do not have a centralized hierarchical organization. At most, various affiliated houses would join together as "congregations" and sometimes the spin-off houses would be dependent on the "mother house". Sometime later, there were national congregations created and the various houses would join together for various reasons.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02443a.htmThe term Order as here applied to the spiritual family of St. Benedict is used in a sense differing somewhat from that in which it is applied to other religious orders. In its ordinary meaning the term implies one complete religious family, made up of a number of monasteries, all of which are subject to a common superior or "general" who usually resides either in Rome or in the mother-house of the order, if there be one. It may be divided into various provinces, according to the countries over which it is spread, each provincial head being immediately subject to the general, just as the superior of each house is subject to his own provincial. This system of centralized authority has never entered into the organization of the Benedictine Order. There is no general or common superior over the whole order other than the pope himself, and the order consists, so to speak, of what are practically a number of orders, called "congregations", each of which is autonomous; all are united, not under the obedience to one general superior, but only by the spiritual bond of allegiance to the same Rule, which may be modified according to the circuмstances of each particular house or congregation. It is in this latter sense that the term Order is applied in this article to all monasteries professing to observe St. Benedict's Rule.
St. Benedict did not, strictly speaking, found an order; we have no evidence that he ever contemplated the spread of his Rule to any monasteries besides those which he had himself established.
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During the first four or five centuries after the death of St. Benedict there existed no organic bond of union amongst the various abbeys other than the Rule itself and obedience to the Holy See. According to the holy legislator's provisions each monastery constituted an independent family, self-contained, autonomous, managing its own affairs, and subject to no external authority except that of the local diocesan bishop, whose powers of control were, however, limited to certain specific occasions. The earliest departures from this system occurred when several of the greater abbeys began sending out offshoots, under the form of daughter-houses retaining some sort of dependence upon the mother abbey from which they sprang. This mode of propagation, together with the various reforms that began to appear in the eleventh and succeeding centuries, paved the way for the system of independent congregations, still a feature peculiar to the Benedictine Order.
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A system which comprised many hundreds of monasteries and many thousands of monks, spread over a number of different countries, without any unity of organization; which was exposed, moreover, to all the dangers and disturbances inseparable from those troublous times of kingdom-making; such a system was inevitably unable to keep worldliness, and even worse vices, wholly out of its midst. Hence it cannot be denied that the monks often failed to live up to the monastic ideal and sometimes even fell short of the Christian and moral standards. There were failures and scandals in Benedictine history, just as there were declensions from the right path outside the cloister, for monks are, after all, but men. But there does not seem ever to have been a period of widespread and general corruption in the order. Here and there the members of some particular house allowed abuses and relaxations of rule to creep in, so that they seemed to be falling away from the true spirit of their state, but whenever such did occur they soon called forth efforts for a restoration of primitive austerity; and these constantly recurring reform movements form one of the surest evidences of the vitality which has pervaded the Benedictine Institute throughout its entire history. It is important to note, moreover, that all such reforms as ever achieved any measure of success came invariably from within, and were not the result of pressure from outside the order.
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Lay Brothers.—Up to the eleventh century in Benedictine houses no distinction of rank was made between the clerical and the lay brethren. All were on an equal footing in the community and at first comparatively few seem to have been advanced to the priesthood. St. Benedict himself was probably only a layman; at any rate it is certain that he was not a priest. A monk not in sacred orders was always considered as eligible as a priest for any office in the community, even that of abbot, though for purposes of convenience some of the monks were usually ordained for the service of the altar; and until literary and scholastic work, which could only be undertaken by men of some education and culture, began to take the place of manual labour, all shared alike in the daily round of agricultural and domestic duties. St. John Gualbert, the founder of Vallombrosa, was the first to introduce the system of lay brethren, by drawing a line of distinction between the monks who were clerics and those who were not. The latter had no stalls in choir and no vote in chapter; neither were they bound to the daily recitation of the breviary Office as were the choir monks. Lay brothers were entrusted with the more menial work of the monastery, and all those duties that involved intercourse with the outside world, in order that the choir brethren might be free to devote themselves entirely to prayer and other occupations proper to their clerical vocation. The system spread rapidly to all branches of the order and was imitated by almost every other religious order. At the present day there is hardly a congregation, Benedictine or otherwise, that has not its lay brethren, and even amongst numerous orders of nuns a similar distinction is observed, either between the nuns that are bound to choir and those that are not, or between those that keep strict enclosure and those that are not so enclosed. The habit worn by the lay brethren is usually a modification of that of the choir monks, sometimes differing from it in colour as well as in shape; and the vows of the lay brethren are in most congregations only simple, or renewable periodically, in contrast with the solemn vows for life taken by the choir religious. In some communities at the present time the lay brothers equal and even outnumber the priests, especially in those, like Beuron or New Nursia, where farming and agriculture are carried out on a large scale.
Topic: Benedictine Dimond Brothers (Read 1470 times)