Benedict was born to a noble Umbrian family and sent to Rome for the rhetorical education appropriate to his class. Repelled by the licentiousness of the city, he abandoned his studies at twenty and withdrew to a cave at Subiaco in the Sabine hills, where he lived as a hermit for three years, fed by the monk Romanus who lowered bread to him on a rope.
Disciples gathered around him; he organized twelve small monasteries of twelve monks each at Subiaco, then moved with a few companions south to Monte Cassino around 529. There, on the site of a Roman temple of Apollo which he destroyed, he founded the great abbey that bears his name and composed his Rule — seventy-three short chapters of practical spiritual wisdom for cenobitic life.
The Rule of Benedict — moderate, humane, balancing prayer (ora) and work (labora), demanding obedience and stability but never extreme asceticism — became the foundational document of Western monasticism. For some six centuries it was the only Rule followed in Latin Europe. From Monte Cassino sprang all the great Benedictine houses — Cluny, Monte Cassino itself, Saint-Denis, Westminster, St. Gall, Subiaco, Camaldoli, Vallombrosa, the English Benedictines — and from them all the subsequent religious orders of Latin Christianity took their pattern.
He died on March 21, 547, standing in prayer at the altar of Monte Cassino, supported by his brethren, after receiving the Eucharist. Pope St. Gregory the Great preserved his life and miracles in the second book of his Dialogues (593–594) — our principal source for his biography. Paul VI declared him Patron of Europe in 1964.