Saint Scholastica

Scholastica was the twin sister of Benedict of Nursia, and she is one of those figures history has always told “alongside” someone else, but who did something of her own, something great. They were born in Nursia in 480. Their mother died right after giving birth; their father, Eutropius Anicius, raised them on his own and vowed to dedicate his daughter to monastic life. At twelve the twins were sent to Rome to study, and they came back shaken: the dissolute life they had seen had troubled them both. Benedict withdrew first. Scholastica, who had become the sole heir to a considerable fortune, asked her father to let her enter a monastery — and her father, remembering his vow, agreed, though it pained him. She followed her brother to Subiaco, and when Benedict founded Monte Cassino she founded her own monastery at Piumarola, seven kilometers to the south. There, with her sisters, she began to live her brother’s rule: from that monastery comes **the women’s branch of the Benedictine Order**, that is, fifteen centuries of nuns across half the world. Among her recommendations, the one she insisted on most was the rule of silence, and in particular avoiding conversations with people from outside the monastery. What we know about her was left to us by Gregory the Great, in the second book of his Dialogues. She died at Piumarola on February 10, 547. If your name is Scholastica, today is your name day — a very rare name today, but one that for centuries meant something precise. Two twins, two monasteries, two identical rules. Every now and then history remembers the sister too.