Camaldolese History Class

00:00
00:00
Audio loading...

Welcome! You can log in or create an account to save favorites, edit keywords, transcripts, and more.

Serial: 
NC-00159

Keywords:

AI Suggested Keywords:

Description: 

Camaldolese History Class. Introduces where to find Camaldolese resources in the NCH library. Discusses bibliography and primary sources. Life of the Five Brothers (earliest manuscript).

AI Summary: 

-

Is This AI Summary Helpful?
Your vote will be used to help train our summarizer!
Photos: 
Notes: 

#item-set-042

Transcript: 

Is that the usual for here? Yeah, Cyprian did a 45 minute one and Yosef one did an hour and 15 minutes. I am not surprised. I would sort of aim at an hour. Unless we have to do something in kind of short. So we'll meet next week and then when I come back, I come back on the 15th of May. On a Tuesday. And we'll meet on Wednesday that week. The very next day I get back because Thursday that week is recreation day, I think. And so we'll just fit it in as soon as I get back so we don't lose yet another week. As far as I can tell, Augustin, you're going to catch about half of this course. It looks like it's going to run about 15 to 20 periods. Closer to 15, I suspect.

[01:02]

But that's the way it looks right now at least. 15 classes? Yeah, about that. They want me to teach monastic history following this one. And that course runs between 36 and 40 periods. We'll see. We'll see if it even happens or where we go with it. There's not going to be any assignment in this class. This would be very hard to have, you know, either written or presentational assignments being given for this because almost everything is in a foreign language. And we'd have to do peripheral stuff, and that's just busy. I mean, I could give you, well, why don't you do a presentation on the Harris exhibit that are going on at this time, which is fine, but maybe next time around.

[02:05]

I don't think we'll do that this time. If I do teach the general monastic history course, then we'll get into major presentations, and that can be really fun. I've done that before. In fact, a recipient's class gave Ezekiel and Jonah, and I guess it was Matthew, and the recipient gave fine presentations. We had a lot of fun with that class. Anyway, you'll have noticed probably already that I have set aside a reference shelf for Kamaldi's studies course. You're welcome to look at that any time you want. Please don't take the stuff out of the library because I have it there for me as well in case I need to grab it before any given lecture. Also, I want to talk a little bit about our library as far as Kamaldi's studies goes. We have a pretty good collection now.

[03:07]

I've gotten an awful lot over the years from Italy, and when I was in Italy, the two summers over there, and again last fall, and usually stuff my suitcases full of things that I can bring over that we don't have for our library. You probably already do know where our main Kamaldi section is, and the Monte Corona section is just a shelf underneath that. So the 277.098 and 277.100 cover most of the Kamaldi's history at least. We also have a large section of Peter Damian over in the patristics section, so 236, you'll find Peter Damian. And there are odd things cataloged here and there depending on the subject matter. For instance, our art books on our artists and whatnot, they're in the art section

[04:12]

for the most part. And Benedetto Collati's collection, what is it, Sapienza Monastica or something like that, Sapienza Monastica, is actually in 242.304, so it's with monastic and religious life, well, lectures or essays or whatever. So it's not in the Kamaldi section at all. Also in the church history section, you can find a number of things, including the complete set of the Fonte Avellana volumes, the annual that comes out of the Fonte Avellana studies. In fact, the next volume of that, which we should be getting sometime this summer, will give us the proceedings and papers given at the Fonte Avellana conference that Joseph and I attended last fall.

[05:14]

And our talks will be in there, of course, in Italian. Some of the matter, material that I can cover in this course, will come out in the book that we have coming out with Lit Press in the fall. For instance, again, Joseph's and my talks will be chapters in that book, as well as quite a bit of stuff. It's really going to be a fine volume, a fine resource for us, vocationally, certainly, but also just getting our Kamaldi's message across to a wider market than Italian. We don't have much published in English. Languages. If you have any foreign languages at all that are on this list here,

[06:20]

Latin, Italian, French, German, Spanish, there are things on our history or spirituality that are available to you in the library. I put Spanish in brackets because there are only a couple little things, and they are actually things that are written by or about the Coronese who are in Colombia. So you won't find any other Spanish resources. But if you can read French or Latin or Spanish, then you can pretty well wade your way through Italian. It's not hard at all. And we have a lot of good stuff in Italian. My own background is I'm self-taught, although I had Latin and French from childhood. I taught myself Italian. I began the year before I came here while I was still in North Dakota,

[07:26]

and I taught myself the basics of grammar and just plowed my way through the history, the Monte Corona congregation, which we never had. It was very rare. It was an assumption that had a copy. We don't have it, or we didn't have it until a month ago when I borrowed the copy from the Monte Coronas in Ohio and photocopied their history for us. So we have now at least a photocopy of that. But anyway, I'm just saying this just to point out that if you just have the discipline, and if you've learned any languages at all, you know this is true. If you just have the discipline to keep at it, you can get languages, at least reading comprehension-wise. And these languages are valuable for commodity studies. Even German.

[08:27]

We have a number of things that if you can read German, are available to us in commodity studies. Some of the first critical stuff that was done on St. Romuald, for instance, is only available in German. And there are a few things on Peter Damian, critical commentaries and bibliographic stuff and historical stuff, that is in German only. But the main bulk of our materials will be found in Latin, Italian, and French. And now we have a growing body in English. Mostly history, but a little bit of spirituality also. And of course our main primary sources now are translated into English.

[09:29]

Does anyone here... Oh, you have French, don't you, Augustine? Do you have French? You have Spanish. And you have French? Have any of you studied Latin? See, that's... Yeah. Well, then you can get through just plugging through or plodding through stuff. Also, Latin is still the most invaluable or most valuable language for the studies of commodity stuff, only because our primaries, sources, are in the original Latin. And so you could read an Italian translation, now you can read an English translation. We have the French translations also. You can have all of them like I did. When I was doing some work, I had all of them spread out in front of me and just noticed how things were changing from language to language. But still, Latin is the most important. If you're going to do any serious work in commodity studies at all, down the line. For instance, Augustine, if you do something from a major paper over there

[10:32]

or something in your own tradition, it's really good to brush up on your Latin a little bit so that you can at least have the primary sources in the original there. And even if you're using an Italian or English, at least so you know enough Latin to zoom in on the phrase you're using or working with. Okay. Bibliography. I've got now, I guess it must be close to 43 pages of bibliography that I've developed over the years on Kamaldoli's history and Kamaldoli's spirituality, mainly. There's a lot of other stuff that could be put in here, but I wanted to limit myself to history and spirituality. This full bibliography will appear at the end of our book that's coming out, Blick Press.

[11:33]

And so, you know, I presume everybody in the community will have a copy of that book. And so they'll have the bibliography available to themselves. Do any of you know this booklet here, this Kamaldoli? Do you have a copy? These are extras that I have, and they're good just for nothing else for the photos of Kamaldoli. So I'll give you these. I still have one more. I wonder, has Fish been to Kamaldoli? I posted to one of the houses there. I don't know which one, but he might like it. He or Kevin would love it probably. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I better hold this for Kevin. Well, we'll see. We'll see who really wants it. There's an English version of that now that they sell at Kamaldoli also. And maybe while you're over there, you might want to grab a few. When you're at Kamaldoli, you're going to find them laying all over the place.

[12:38]

Just sort of collect them slowly. Sure. Bring the booty back when you come home on vacation. Anyway, you might want to look through this bibliography. There's a surprising amount of stuff in English that I've found here and there. And someday when you're over in the library, just go through the, or when you have the book this fall, just go through the bibliography and see what is available. So I want to say a little bit this week then about our primary sources for our history and our spirituality. The first work of primary source that we have is The Life of the Five Brothers,

[13:40]

written by Bruno Boniface of Crawford. What year was it? 1888 it was published. It had been missing for centuries. Obviously, Bruno Boniface wasn't living in 1888. The original passio or passion of the five brothers saints and their companions was discovered and published as a dissertation, a doctoral dissertation in 1888 by a Dr. Reinhard Kade who found it, found this manuscript dated 1204 and published it in 1888.

[14:43]

Now already then, published 1204, it wasn't, obviously it wasn't a first edition of the passion. And later on, five years later, I should say this doctor published it and then five years later published it again, or it was published again by somebody else as a dissertation in Krakow, so in Poland, where the manuscript was discovered. Actually, it was discovered in Germany the first time around and then published in Poland by this other fellow as part of the dissertation. This is the only primary source we have written during the lifetime of St. Romuald. We tend to think, you know, the life of Romuald was written right around that time. Well, it was written right around that time,

[15:46]

but it wasn't written during his own lifetime, whereas this one was. The Italian version came out in 1951, and it was done by one of our commandoly scholars, Bernardo Iniesti, who did an awful lot of stuff and really got things published on our saints, on our history, and on our primary sources. And so that copy, or that Italian version, had the Latin original and then the Italian translation. You'll run across, if you study commandoly studies, you'll run across this name Lasus all the time. Lasus, French fellow. He's a French Dominican. And he's always publishing in French the things that Iniesti has done in Italian.

[16:58]

And so, basically, if you don't know Italian and you know French, you can get a lot of our primary source, and some of the history and spirituality as well, because this fellow kept publishing. He was quite taken, still is, he's still alive, quite taken with both Romuald and Peter Damian, and so published a lot of their stuff in France. He's a very close friend of the other congregation, the Coronese. In 1994, we finally got it in English, thanks to Thomas Matjes. We got the life of the, he calls it what? It's in that book, The Mystery of the Five Brothers, or The Mystery of Romuald and the Five Brothers, or something like that, that we published here with Source Books. Another thing, if you're really interested in the Five Brothers and Bruno Boniface,

[18:12]

you'll want to read what amounts to be the Italian equivalent of the master's thesis by our own Roberto, who's now working on the doctorate. Interestingly enough, he's doing his doctoral dissertation on that whole secret part of the history, and we'll get to that later on, where in the 1930s, where the Cenobites were shut down and forced to either become secularized or join our congregation. And it was all hushed up, and there was some finagling going around there, and it's never been known exactly what happened. And he's doing his doctorate on that whole episode. I don't know how much he's going to be able to get out of the Vatican Library, but we'll see what he comes up with, if things have become available to him.

[19:14]

His name is Forniciai Roberto. Forniciai. I might be misspelling. Forna? Forna. Forniciai. Fine fellow. He's living at the... He's now the cellarer at Rome, while he's there as a student as well. And he's going to be ordained shortly. He was a brother for many, many years, and then decided to go for ordination just recently. And his work is on Bruno Boniface and that whole episode with the five brothers, and the whole Polish thing, and Bruno doing his own thing, and it's a marvelous tool. It's not published yet. He wanted me to translate it and publish it in English,

[20:15]

and I never got around to it. In fact, I ended up at Epiphany, and then on my leave of absence. So I never got to it. But if you read Italian, it's quite good. I don't think Joseph still has it. He had it for many, many months because he was doing his work on the triple good. But anyway, it's really fun to read also, if you're interested at all. The second primary source that we have is, of course, the life of St. Romuald, done by Peter Damian. Peter Damian, who did not know Romuald, in fact, never met him, met some of his disciples, but never met Romuald. Peter Damian, who's, oh my goodness, the millennial celebration of his birth is coming up in 2007.

[21:21]

So it's a thousand years ago that he was born, practically. He did some, evidently some, hunting around to find disciples of Romuald and to get anecdotes from them, stories and what facts he could gather about the saint and about his work, and ended up writing the life of Romuald. The Latin text you can find in Minia, and we have the two, you know, it's contained in the two volumes of Peter Damian from Minia, and we have those in the library. Actually, they're signed out to me at this point. But anyway, we have them, and if you want to look at it, I have it. That was published in 1853. The critical Latin text and a major source for the studies of Comaldi's history

[22:35]

and Romualdian studies was done by a fellow named Tabacco. And he did a lot of publishing on Romuald. And Peter Damian, and the early Romualdian world. Anyway, he published the authoritative Latin, critical Latin text in 1957. Can't underestimate the value of this guy's work and what he did for our congregation and for our study of our history. Thomas Mattis then came out with an Italian translation in 1988. And in 1994, Mattis then came out with the English translation,

[23:36]

which came out in that same volume that the Life of the Five Brothers was published in, the source books. Lassus, of course, did a French version in the 1960s that came out. Other important sources that we have. I mean, we've already reached the end of the primary sources. However, there are other primary sources that are contingent or tangential to Romuald, to what became the Romualdian movement and then later on the Comaldi's congregations. And these primary sources are Peter Damian's Opus 51,

[24:39]

which you can also get under the title Rule of the Aramidical Life in English. We have these volumes that are coming out, the works of Peter Damian done by Owen Blum, Franciscan, Owen Blum, actually, B-L-U-M. Owen Blum and the Catholic University of Washington is doing them. There are six volumes planned, four of which now have been translated. These are not in the Peter Damian section. These are in the Fathers of the Church series section. And these particular books are in the new portion of that series called the Medieval Continuation. So if you ever wanted to see that, I mean, you know how to use the library, but I can easily and quickly point them out to you sometime in the library.

[25:41]

That's the only English version we have of Peter Damian's works. The Latin, of course, as I said, you can get in Minia. And an Italian version of this particular Opus 51, which is also the letter to the monk named Toizzo. And that's how Peter Damian did, you know, that's how he did his works. In the forms of letters. He'd write a letter to Empress Agnes or the monk Toizzo or Abbot, whatever, Alberto or something. And within that, he would write in the letter and say, well, now here's the rule you had been asking about. And that's how we got the rule. Or the other, another important one is the Avalonita customary. So the customs of how they were living at Fonte Avalona during Peter Damian's day. And that was a letter to some monk named Stefano.

[26:46]

And that's Opus 15, by the way. And we also, you know, you can get that in the same volume, Volume 2 in English, by this blum. Anyway, in 1959, this Agnesti, Bernardo Agnesti, did the Italian translations of all the monastic writings of Peter Damian, which are quite a few. So he came out with two volumes of Scritti Monastici. And those were basically what we had until, besides the Latin, of course, until recently, until blum came along, as far as English is concerned. So what we have in the Avalonita customary, then, is a pretty concise description

[27:57]

of how the monks were living at Fonte Avalona. Fonte Avalona was certainly Romualdian. It wasn't a part of the Camaldolese family until centuries later. But it was following the life and customs of the Romualdian world. Romuald visited Fonte Avalona. Some say he founded it. That's less likely. But he visited it shortly after it was founded. Romuald did make some foundations just down the mountain, just around a few bends. For instance, Sitria, the little place where his own monks put him in prison as he was an older monk. I've seen the prison. When I went there, it's just down the road from Fonte Avalona, a couple mountain turns.

[29:01]

When I went there, there was a farmer who owned the land there, had been fighting with the monks and the government because he wanted to use the church, which is almost all that's left, for his cattle. He wanted to use it as a barn. The government was not letting him do that. It was just staying locked up. We had keys. The Romualdis had keys. We'd go down there once in a while. It was a beautiful, simple little church there, beautiful little old altar. There's this room off to the side for what was like a sacristy. That's where Romuald was imprisoned for quite a long time by his own monks. They thought he was crazy and had done sexually indiscreet things, which was absolutely preposterous at his age. At the instigation of this, what was his name, Romano or something like that,

[30:09]

one of the monks who was out to get Romuald. Anyway, whenever I can, I'll bring in little tidbits that I have gathered during my three trips over there and what memories I have of places and of people. As I said, I'm self-taught. I'm no expert on things come all the ways, but I don't think we have any experts other than perhaps Ugo, the novice master and librarian at Kamaldoli itself. He is an expert on Kamaldoli's history and culture. Thomas Matthes certainly knows a lot too. Very, very good on things Kamaldoli's. I'm self-taught and I just went at it doggedly. When I went over there in the summer, it was in 93 or 94,

[31:11]

I just read everything. I could get my hands on and came back needing trifocals. I had kind of ruined my vision over there. As I say, I'm not an expert, but I can give what I can give. Slowly over the years, we're amassing together in English at least a certain body of stuff so that we have something to contribute to the English world about who we are and hope to be and have been in the past. With this new book now coming out with Lit Press, we can have something on our spirituality and not just the volumes on our history. Also, this very series of constitutions that we have are again primary source material,

[32:13]

although they're not primary source material to the life of Romuald or even necessarily to the Romualdian movement as such as a whole. These constitutions localized at Kamaldoli give us primary focus on how they're actually living their life and what was their theory of monastic life just down the centuries from Romuald. Certainly, Blessed Rudolf's constitutions, Blessed Rudolf IV, which were published in 1080 and then 1085, are very significant. Now, this is just, what, 60 years after Romuald's death that these constitutions of life at Kamaldoli were published.

[33:18]

We have them in English. It's just sort of an unpublished, informal translation that we can have in the library, that you can find in the library. The Latin text you'll find in the Annales. Do you all know what the Annales are? Annales. Annales. Annales. Kamaldolenses. Kamaldolenses. The Annales are nine humongous volumes with sheepskin binding published in the 18th century by two of our important scholar monks in the house at Venice at that time, at San Michele di Murano in the Venice Lagoon.

[34:24]

Anyway, they went to all our houses and all the foundations, got into the archives, collected every single thing they could get from all these centuries and amassed them into nine huge volumes. So we have constitutions, stories, lists of this, letters, guest book lists, who visited what and where, various chapter acts, you know, the whole thing. Anyway, we have this locked up in our vault in the library. And if you ever want to see those, just ask me and we'll go in there. We're very lucky to have a copy of that. The houses in Italy, do you think you have a copy? Yes, yes.

[35:25]

One of the houses didn't. I think it was San Giorgio at Garda. But now they got the library from Naples. When Naples closed down, I had already hunted out the Naples library, a number of things I was going to ask Emanuele if we could have. And then I found out that Garda had already snatched it all up. For one thing, I wanted to get a two-volume history of San Michele di Murano, of the house of Murano, by a Franciscan, and they have it. They got the whole library. Anyway, all the other houses have Annales as well. And there are probably some around Italy in the various secular libraries. You know, we lost most of our stuff. The government just took everything.

[36:27]

Even the towns nearby, for instance, when the Commodities were kicked out of Commodity, the towns nearby, the civic councils decreed that they could have the library. And they went in and they trucked off all our libraries. They still have that stuff. So you go to Polpi and Bibbiena and Arezzo, and the state libraries have our manuscripts, our priceless manuscripts, including some things they don't have any use for at all. It's more like a power trip than anything. But anyway, it's their possession now. We got some things back, but not an awful lot. There's probably quite a few copies of the Annales laying around Italy in various corners, never looked at, probably just gathering mold. Was this during the Fascist movement? Way before that. This was, yeah, the Napoleonic suppressions, and then later on, the Italian National Suppressions

[37:29]

of the religious, and we'll get to that when we hit the history sections. So it was in the last century, well, excuse me, not two centuries ago. This is the late, mid and late 1800s where this happened. But Rudolf said, these aren't the only constitutions. We also have the Constitutions of Martin III, Blessed Martin III. This was in the 1200s. And his three books of constitutions, so there's Martin, and there are three books of constitutions, are called the five books, and we'll get to this in a minute, five books de moribus. So about the customs, de moribus, about the customs. After Martin, just a little bit down the line,

[38:32]

Girard, who was prior general, added a fourth book to those that already existed of Martin, about, again, about the changes in the customs that come out of it. And then down the line further, Bonaventura, Bonaventure of Fano, who was prior general, added yet another book. And so you ended up with the five books of de moribus. This is my next project. I'm going to translate from Minya, or from the Annales, the Latin, these five books of the customaries from the 13th to 14th century. And I'm kind of excited about it, but I haven't started it because I'm waiting for the galleys of this book to come, and so I can get that out of the way and bring it to closure, and then start on my next project. And this is what I'll be doing.

[39:33]

And we'll see what I can come up with. Maybe something fun. Maybe something publishable. Another important primary source is The Life of St. Peter Damian by John of Lodi, L-O-D-I. And this I translated in 1992, so we have it in English. It's in the library. You can also get it in Italian or Latin. I think probably in French as well. But certainly two different Italian versions, and of course the Latin in Minya. Just a few words about the Annales then, and then we'll close for today. And we'll talk about the background,

[40:35]

the 10th and 11th century background then next time before we get into Romuald as such. This is the outline for where we're going with this course. And basically it's an amalgam of stuff I've done all pieced together. The stuff I've published on our spirituality and history, some of the translation I've done, a course I gave on Kamaldi's artists, lectures I gave on Kamaldi's history in a workshop, and some other stuff that hasn't been done anywhere but I had, and I fit it into this framework. So this is where we're going to go with that. So next time, as you can see, we'll talk about the 10th and 11th century. Just before we do that, or before we close for today, I want to say a little more about the Annales, Kamaldi lenses.

[41:39]

The two fellows who did this are Micherelli, and Costadone. Oops, that's a C, Costadone. That's probably an I, huh? Micherelli is Costadone. John Benedict, or John Benedetto Micherelli, was born in the early 18th century. He was at Murano. He was a teacher there and then became the novice master. He was a bibliographer, a librarian at Murano, and the archivist. And then they made him the Chancellor to the Abbot General, and then Abbot.

[42:41]

This is at a period where we had Abbots. And then he himself became Abbot General. Anselm Costadone, or Anselmo Costadone, was a contemporary confrer of Micherelli's. He was also a teacher. He was prior under Micherelli. Followed him into the archives work. Also became Chancellor to the Abbot General. Also became Abbot. He just sort of followed in the footsteps of Micherelli. And they were very close collaborators. These two monks are the two who traveled then, when they weren't busy being Abbots or whatever, to all our houses and all those early foundations, some of which had fallen apart or had gone down and tried to hunt down documentation and whatnot. All the foundations of the congregation,

[43:45]

doing research in the archives, collecting as much as they could. And they modeled their work on the work being done in France at the time by Mabillon and the Bolandists, who were doing this type of work regarding the Benedictine order, Benedictine saints. The Maoist congregation in France was doing incredible work of collecting as much as they could and writing it all down and doing research before it was totally lost to history. Did an invaluable work for the monastic world. Anyway, our monks decided they wanted to model their work on the Kamaldolese congregation and movement on this work by Mabillon. They came up with nine volumes, each volume of which contains a sort of general dissertation or particular points of Kamaldolese history

[44:47]

or monasticism in general, da-da-da-da-da. Then the annals themselves, so collections of, you know, sort of the calendar, year calendar, of who went where and what's going on and what the general chapter did that year and da-da-da-da-da. And then a huge appendix in the end of each volume which has all the documentation that they collected that corroborates, you know, the annals themselves. This work was encouraged very, very strongly by Pope Benedict XIV at the time. And it took them many, many years to do the work and they published it, you know, one volume at a time. And the last volume was published right around the death of Miterelli.

[45:47]

I don't know if he... I think he had died before the last volume came out. One other piece of secondary source material I want to point out is a book that we have in the library, and I have my own copy as well, by Vedovato. Giuseppe Vedovato. This came out while I was at Camaldoli doing that year of reading, or summer of reading. He wrote a book, or he published basically a dissertation, a book entitled Camaldoli, and this is in Italian, of course, Camaldoli and its Congregation, From its Origins to 1184, History and Documentation. And it's got the documents collected, and it's there.

[46:50]

And it's a wonderful source and resource for the study of early Camaldoli and its fight with the bishop and how it developed into a congregation. And I'll talk a little bit about that when we get to the historical section. But this volume is very important and very interesting if you're at all interested in Camaldoli's history. You know, for the necessary preliminary work to understanding our heritage, Vedovato's volume here is very significant. Okay, that's enough for this time. So next time then we'll start on the actual sort of historical framework into which Romuald and Peter Damian found themselves inserted. Is there any questions about what we're going to do or how?

[47:56]

Or any volunteers about special projects you want to do even though I'm not going to assign them? Augustin? Publish a paper or something in the next couple of weeks during your free time? Yeah. Maybe a tidbit more on Koronathy? Koronathy? Koronathy in Colombia. In Colombia. Oh, you mean you want to find those books? Just out of curiosity, what is that? One is a... there's two of them, I think. One is a... One is a... Yeah, they just made a... It's the only house that's really doing well in Monte Corona right now. They just made a daughter foundation. Also in South America. I think Argentina? The problem with that... How do I get into this in a diplomatic way?

[49:03]

There's so much bad feeling between our congregations and so much of it is based on total ignorance of each other. But, well, this is the way we're supposed to feel. That type of thing, you know? They have some great people. But they also have people who are as pig-headed and stubborn and biased as people in our own congregation. And there's been a lot of blockage to understanding and whatnot. There seems to be, under Emanuele, a lot more coming together and trying to do some things. The Coronese themselves are afraid that they're going to be forced into our congregation. By Rome. By Rome, the same way the Cenobites were in the 1930s. And they're a little scared right now. They're really going down in numbers. I don't know, we're pretty distant from each other

[50:10]

in our interpretations, even in our lifestyle. Their lifestyle is very regimented and very enclosed. Great people though. Basil in Ohio is a wonderful man. He started out here and he found it too lax and so went there. He's the prior there now. You know, I write to Basil once in a while and I do all I can to encourage our cooperation as groups, two groups. And this dates back to when I gave them their annual retreat out of Epiphany. I gave them a week's retreat on our history and our spirituality. Comaldolese, our Comaldolese, together, our Comaldolese heritage. And my hope is that under Emanuele

[51:14]

things will just get closer and more even keeled, but you always have those biases that you have to deal with. Even among our group right here, people don't even know a Coronese. I've never been to a Coronese, and yet you'll hear them say disparaging remarks or something. It's only because they've heard some rumor or some little story or anecdote. You know, and that's what it's based on a lot. They have some weird people, let me tell you. There's some very good men too. Yeah, so we'll meet next, I guess Thursday it'll be, unless something happens, then we'll move it to Wednesday. Huh? Oh, sure, if you want. First two, I'm gone.

[52:20]

Okay, because I'll be gone in a second. Do you want to keep that? Well, maybe I'll wait and see who needs it. Kevin has been to Comaldolese, I believe. Oh, last time he was over there? When he was studying in Rome. Well, no, maybe it was just in San Gregorio. And Bede's only been to San Gregorio. But maybe Fish has been to... Fish was at either Fontevillana or Comaldolese. Oh, I bet it was Comaldolese. I think it was Comaldolese. So maybe he doesn't need it. Well, we'll see. It's a nice little... It's a nice photography. Yeah. And when we get to Comaldolese, we'll go through this, and I'll point out the stuff that I'm actually lecturing on. Various parts of the place and whatnot. Excuse me.

[53:22]

Is that still going? Even my hiccup is on the thing. Excuse me.

[53:29]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ