United States or Bouvet Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The serviceswhich the Cluniacs and the Cistercians, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, rendered to the militant Papacy were more impalpable and indirect. From time to time, it is true, they were entrusted with important missions to raise money, to preach a crusade, to influence monarchs, to convert or to persecute the heretic; St. But even in St.

The cloisters of Cluniacs and Cistercians branches of the Benedictines were filled with idle and dissolute monks.

Clears, which seems only to have contained the prior and one monk, who did not live with much strictness, though Gerald of Barry says the Cluniacs here were better than they were abroad, and not nearly so bad as the Cistercians.

The Cluniacs were at first famous for the simplicity of their lives and the strictness of their discipline, but as time went on they became too rich and so too luxurious, and at last they too needed reforming, and a new reformer arose.

The entire organisation of the Cistercian Order made it a strong contrast to the Cluniacs, both in the mode of life of its members and in the method of government. The Cluniacs had become wealthy and luxurious: their black dress, the symbol of humility, had become rather a mark of hypocrisy.

Benedict did in the sixth century and those of the Cluniacs and the Cistercians in the eleventh, and it is what the Franciscans and Dominicans tried to do in the fourteenth century, and failed because the fall of the cultural and historic wave had already begun.

The great reform movement of the eleventh century had emanated from the monks of Cluny; but just as the degradation of the monastic ideal by the Benedictines had called into existence the Order of Cluny with its reformed Benedictine rule, so now the failure of the Cluniacs to live up to the expectations and to minister to the needs of the most fervent religious spirits caused the foundation of a number of new Orders.

To the great body of the Benedictines and the Cluniacs were added in the middle of the twelfth century the Cistercians, who founded their houses among the desolate moorlands of Yorkshire in solitary places which had known no inhabitants since the Conqueror's ravages, or among the swamps of Lincolnshire.

But the Cluniacs instead of withdrawing from the world began to dominate it, losing many of the essential features of monasticism. Hence another reform movement arose about 1100, that of the Cistercian Order, which is associated with the name of St. Bernard. This aimed at reviving the Benedictine rule in all its strictness, insisting especially on manual labour.

The Cluniacs in France and the congregations of Italy all hailed his elevation as the beginning of a better time, and side by side with this simonist Pope a young and brave monk suddenly appears, who, after the heroic exertions of a lifetime, was to raise the degenerate papacy to a height hitherto undreamed of.