White Smoke for the Black Monks

It had been a few years since the Collegio Sant’Anselmo had seen such activity: starting on September 6, 2024, no fewer than 215 abbots, priors, and superiors of the worldwide Benedictine Confederation met on the Aventine Hill for two intense weeks of prayer and work in order to name a new Abbot Primate for the Order founded by St. Benedict of Nursia.

On September 14, Abbot Jeremias Schröder, superior of the St. Ottilien Archabbey in Eresing (Germany), became, for an 8-year term, the eleventh Abbot Primate of the great Benedictine family, succeeding in this function Abbot Gregory Polan, an American elected in 2016.

Born in 1964 in Bavaria, the new Abbot Primate has been a monk for over 40 years: “He studied philosophy, theology, history and archivistics at the Pontifical Athenaeum of Sant'Anselmo and at St. Benet's Hall in Oxford,” Vatican News explains.

“The world is on fire right now,” Abbot Jeremias Schröder told Vatican media following his election. He then added: “We will reflect on how we can truly contribute to peace [...] East and West are separating. The Benedictines have the ancient mission to be in relationship with the Eastern Churches. There is something where we can really make a contribution and we will work on this."

The new Abbot Primate made a name for himself during his time at the Synod on the Family, as representative of the Union of Superiors General, by supporting a proposal aiming to “decentralize” doctrine: the episcopal conferences should be authorized, according to him, to formulate responses to suit the “degree of social acceptance of homosexuality” and that of “divorced and remarried people,” which differs “according to cultures.”

A pragmatism far removed from the faith and Tradition of the Church which seems to have found an echo in the controversy concerning the non-ritual blessings granted to couples who are irregular in the eyes of Church law, a controversy sparked by the current Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The function of the Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Order is a legacy of the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), who spared no effort to reunite the then scattered Black Monks—as they were then called—into a single family, the Confoederatio OSB.

In the Pope’s documents of the time, this union was intended to make the sons of St. Benedict capable of fulfilling their mission of teaching the truth in modern times as in past centuries, as Dom Giovanni Spinelli O.S.B. recalls in his article, “Leo XIII and the Foundation of the Benedictine Confederation, Example of the Policy of Roman Centralism” (published in French; Publications de l’Ecole Française de Rome, 2006, No. 368):

“The Pope released, on July 12, 1893, the papal brief Summum semper, which appointed an Abbot Primate for the Benedictine Order in the person of Dom Hildebrand de Hemptinne, who was to remain in office ad nutum Pontificis [Editor’s note: at the discretion of the Roman Pontiff]. The same brief established the Confederation of Benedictine Congregations of the commonly termed ‘Black Monks.’ In this confederation, no congregation was superior to the others.

“Each congregation kept intact its constitutions, its traditions, its rights, its privileges, its superiors. From one to the other, there was no immediate link; the only link that united them was the Abbot Primate; it was he who, through his office, gave them aliquam unitatem [Editor’s note: a certain unity]. To this essential link was added another, secondary and accessory but real: the Collegio Sant’Anselmo, which had been established in Rome to promote this unity. This is precisely what Dom Schmitz wrote a few decades ago.”

Thereafter, and especially in the wake of Vatican II, the various Benedictine congregations “ended up reclaiming all their independence despite the moral union established by the confederation. This only really lasted as long as the Roman centralism desired by Pius IX and Leo XIII lasted in the Church,” Fr. Spinelli adds.