The Jesuits are commonly believed to have been established by St. Ignatius and the Franciscans by St. Francis of Assisi; the Dominicans by St. Dominic and the Redemptorists by St. Alphonsus of Liguori. But Monasticism is the replication of the Holy Family and a direct product of Pentecost.
In the beginning, God devised a plan by which He would save mankind after the Fall. It would consist in 1.) establishing a Church and 2.) He would teach us how to enter that Church. It is the Church who would bring us back to God.
Immediately after the Fall, the mechanism for God’s plan went into effect. In the Old Testament God gave us types by which we can understand the fulfillment of His plans. He chose a people, the Chosen People, and this would be the type of the Church. And He showed how one may join the Chosen People. He would choose each one personally.
God the Son would be the one to establish the Church and by His life He would teach mankind how to enter the Church. To accomplish both He had to become man. So he was born on Christmas day. There we have the image of the Catholic Church, the Holy Family, and we were also taught how to enter the Church, “by contact” (as Ecclesiologist would put it) as exemplified by the shepherds and by “long distance” as exemplified by the Magi.
Well, Monasticism is imitating the Holy Family.
After Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles to formally establish the Church on earth, the Apostles went about ‘Baptizing…..teaching all the commands….and how to do it.’ What were they, in effect, doing? They were beginning to establish communities of unbelievers in imitation of the Holy Family. And history would describe these attempts as establishing monastic communities.
Most of the apostles were martyred too soon to be able to establish monastic communities but all of them had started the seed of the movement. St. John the Evangelist, because his life was prolonged by a tyrant boiling him in oil and he coming out younger rather than dying, was known to have established a fully monastic community.
So Pope Benedict, in addressing the Congregation of Religious and Consecrated Life reminded them that monasticism is the only life that came out directly from Pentecost, of course, with its origin from the Holy Family. And this is shown in the lives of Jesus and John the Baptist. Jesus lived with the Holy Family, St. John grew up in the dessert (thus starting the monastic tendency).
Monastic life is in imitation of the 30 years of hidden life of Christ, with Mary and Joseph. It is essentially the life of Repentance that begun in the Old Testament and perfected by Christ in the New Testament.
And the Holy Father reminded all the orders that monastic life is the basis of all orders. Is it any wonder that St. Ignatius was living a monastic life in Manresa under the direction of Cisneros, a Benedictine monk; and St. Francis was a monk in the forests of Assisi; and St. Dominic lived by St. Augustine’s rule for monasteries and St. Alphonsus’ spirituality is essentially monastic?
At the beginning of his pontificate, didn’t Pope Benedict XVI remind us that the world today can be saved only by the Rule of St. Benedict as it did before? That is like saying that the world can only be saved today by the Catholic Church, the type of which is the Holy Family, (so the importance of the family) and of which monasticism is its practical application.