The monastery had been founded by Saint Benedict around AD 529, during the last days of the Roman Empire, partly because its excellent defensive position offered protection from a pagan world. It was at Monte Cassino that the saint wrote the Benedictine Rules, establishing the tradition of monasticism in the Western world. It was there he died and was buried. The abbey was sacred ground, an intellectual center and “a symbol of the preservation and cultivation of the things of the mind and the spirit through times of great stress.”1 Now the grand and imposing abbey seemed to glare down at the
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