St. Romuald

St. Romuald was born about 951 at Ravenna in Italy, of a noble family, and was led to conversion after witnessing his own father kill a kinsman in a duel; in horror he retired to do penance at a Benedictine monastery and there embraced the monastic life. Restless for an ever stricter observance, he spent years as a wandering reformer, founding and renewing hermitages across Italy and drawing many to the solitary pursuit of God.

His crowning work was the foundation, about 1023, of the hermitage of Camaldoli in the Apennines of Tuscany, which gave its name to the Camaldolese order. There he wedded the eremitic ideal of the desert fathers to the Rule of St. Benedict, so that monks might live as hermits within a monastic community. His brief Rule counsels the monk to "sit in your cell as in paradise" and to empty himself before God. He died at Val di Castro on 19 June 1027 and is celebrated on that day.