Through The Narrow Gate

“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.”

—Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B.

—From Boniface Wimmer, Abbot of Saint Vincent in Pennsylvania, translated by Dr. Maria Von Mickwitz and Father Warren Murrman, O.S.B., editor.