Manual Labor
Wimmer Wednesday. Boniface Wimmer gives some insights into manual labor:
By laboring, the brothers are to prove that they do not enter the monastery to devote themselves to a life of comfortable leisure, but rather that they are endeavoring to “enter through the narrow gate,” that they do not recoil at the word of the Apostle, “He who does not work, also shall not eat,” nor at Chapter 48 of the Rule of St. Benedict, where he says, “When they live by the labor of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks.”
Though the days are long past when the young prince Columba sat on the same bench in school as the carpenter’s son, Kieran, at the Abbey of Clonard, and along with him sifted the grain and, like the other students, when it was his turn, helped to take care of the simple needs and support himself and the community, so Fr. Boniface nevertheless wanted to take him as his model. For this reason, he had his scholastics, novices, and clerics work along with the brothers in the fields at certain times, such as at planting and harvesting time. Every Order has its traditions, and when these are maintained, it is all the more respected. In this regard, Fr. Boniface followed the example of famous Benedictines, saints as well as scholars.
“When St. Boniface was studying grammar, poetry, and history at Exeter Abbey, in preparation for the study of the sacred books, he never shirked the manual work prescribed in the Rule, when he had a break in his studies,” reports his biographer, St. Willibald. This schedule of studying as well as doing manual labor he introduced at Fulda. St. Bernard always counted manual labor among the very important duties of monks. “Work, seclusion, voluntary poverty, these are the characteristics that distinguish monks, these tend to ennoble monastic life,” he says (Ep. 24). However, this type of enthusiasm for imitating the monks of the Middle Ages suffered some changes over the years at St. Vincent, tempora mutantur.
—From Boniface Wimmer: Abbot of Saint Vincent in Pennsylvania
