Monte Cassino
Monte Cassino is a rocky hill about 130 km (80 miles) southeast of Rome, Italy, c. 2 km to the west of the town of Cassino (the Roman Casinum having been on the hill) and 520 m altitude. St. Benedict of Nursia established his first monastery, the source of the Benedictine Order, here around 529. It was the site of Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944. After WWII, the Abbey was rebuilt, financed by the Italian State. Pope Paul VI reconsecrated it in 1964.
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History
The monastery was constructed on an older pagan site, a temple of Apollo that crowned the hill, enclosed by a fortifying wall above the small town of Cassino, still largely pagan at the time and recently devastated by the Goths. Benedict's first act was to smash the sculpture of Apollo and destroy the altar. He rededicated the site to John the Baptist. Once established there, Benedict never left. At Monte Cassino he wrote the Benedictine Rule that became the founding principle for western monasticism. There at Monte Cassino he received a visit from Totila, king of the Ostrogoths, perhaps in 543 (the only remotely secure historical date for Benedict), and there he died.
Monte Cassino became a model for future developments. Unfortunately its protected site has always made it an object of strategic importance. It was sacked or destroyed a number of times. In 584, during the abbacy of Bonitus, the Lombards sacked the Abbey, and the surviving monks fled to Rome, where they remained for more than a century. During this time the body of St Benedict was transferred to Fleury, the modern Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire near Orleans, France. A flourishing period of Monte Cassino followed its re-establishment in 718 by Abbot Petronax, when among the monks were Carloman, son of Charles Martel; Ratchis, predecessor of the great Lombard Duke and King Aistulf; and Paul the Deacon, the historian of the Lombards. In 744, a donation of Gisulf II of Benevento created the Terra Sancti Benedicti, the secular lands of the abbacy, which were subject to the abbot and nobody else save the pope. Thus, the monastery became the capital of a state comprising a compact and strategic region between the Lombard principality of Benevento and the Byzantine city-states of the coast (Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi). In 883 Saracens sacked and then burned it down. Among the great historians who worked at the monastery, in this period there is Erchempert, whose Historia Langobardorum Beneventanorum is a fundamental chronicle of the ninth-century Mezzogiorno.
It was rebuilt and reached the apex of its fame in the 11th century under the abbot Desiderius (abbot 1058 - 1087), who later became Pope Victor III. The number of monks rose to over two hundred, and the library, the manuscripts produced in the scriptorium and the school of manuscript illuminators became famous throughout the West. The unique Beneventan script flourished there during Desiderius' abbacy. The buildings of the monastery were reconstructed on a scale of great magnificence, artists being brought from Amalfi, Lombardy, and even Constantinople to supervise the various works. The abbey church, rebuilt and decorated with the utmost splendor, was consecrated in 1071 by Pope Alexander II. A detailed account of the abbey at this date exists in the Chronica monasterii Cassinensis by Leo of Ostia and Amatus of Monte Cassino gives us our best source on the early Normans in the south.
Abbot Desiderius (later Pope Victor III) sent envoys to Constantinople some time after 1066 to hire expert Byzantine mosaicists for the decoration of the rebuilt abbey church. According to chronicler Leo of Ostia the Greek artists decorated the apse, the arch and the vestibule of the basilica. Their work was admired by contemporaries but was totally destroyed in later centuries except two fragments depicting greyhounds (now in the Monte Cassino Museum). "The abbot in his wisdom decided that great number of young monks in the monastery should be thoroughly initiated in these arts" - says the chronicler about the role of the Greeks in the revival of mosaic art in medieval Italy.
An earthquake damaged the Abbey in 1349, and although the site was rebuilt it marked the beginning of a long period of decline. In 1321, Pope John XXII made the church of Monte Cassino a cathedral, and the carefully preserved independence of the monastery from episcopal interference was at an end. In 1505 the monastery was joined with that of St. Justina of Padua. The site was sacked by Napoleon's troops in 1799 and from the dissolution of the Italian monasteries in 1866, Monte Cassino became a national monument.
WWII
There was a final destruction on 15 February 1944 when during the Battle of Monte Cassino (January to May 1944), the entire building was pulverized in a series of heavy air-raids by the USAAF due to the mistaken belief it was a German Fallschirmjäger stronghold. In fact, the Abbey was being used as a refuge from the battle by the women and children of nearby Cassino.
- As the Allies moved northward up the boot of Italy, invasion forces stalled on either side of the Gustav Line. With the failed amphibious landing at Anzio (de) and brutal fighting at the Battle of the Rapido River, the Italian campaign arrived at a stalemate in January 1944. Four attempts were made to climb the mountain and take the shrine, and each failure led to a tremendous decline in morale. Fifth Army Commander Mark Clark recalled that the battle of Cassino was, “the most grueling, the most harrowing, and in one aspect the most tragic, of any phase of the war in Italy.” This never-ending battle was one of the places where the all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion earned their nickname “Purple Heart Battalion.” Allied Forces assumed that the Germans were using Monte Cassino as a fortified position and observation post. Even ambiguous information regarding the German’s location was believed to be valid. However, up to the last days before the bombing, Martino Matronola, a monk who remained at Monte Cassino, asserted that the Wehrmacht was not using the monastery. A number of terrified townspeople from Cassino, Matronola, and one other monk were the only ones trapped in the Abbey during the bombing. As B-17s, B-25s, and B-26s soared over the sacred site on February 15, 1944, bombs rained down on much of the structure, reducing it to rubble. Even though German forces were camped on the mountain below, none were harmed during the bombardment. The two monks also survived unscathed, but an estimated 115 refugees taking shelter perished during the attack. In David Hapgood and David Richardson’s book on Monte Cassino, they illustrate the scene as the monks emerged from their underground shelter, “The cloisters and their colonnades were all smashed. Where monumental stairs had led up to the basilica, they saw only a jumble of fallen rocks. . . The statue of Saint Benedict still stood in the cloister, but it had been decapitated.” The bombing decision came only months after Eisenhower’s Protection of Cultural Property Order, signed in December 1943. Eisenhower details in the order, “If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. . . Nothing can stand against the argument of military necessity. That is an accepted principle. But the phrase ‘military necessity’ is sometimes used where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even personal convenience. I do not want it to cloak slackness or indifference.” The total ruin of Monte Cassino evoked mixed emotions on both sides and remains one of the most debated decisions of the war itself. Americans with loved ones and friends involved in the conflict were angry that their family members might be risking their lives to save a building. Preceding the bombing, soldiers and spectators camped out for an optimal view of the destruction. When the initial bombs hit the Abbey, cheers emanated from the troops and reporters below. Many American newspapers published the falsehood that the monastery was inhabited by German troops, capitalizing on the headline that the Nazis violated the religious institution to use it as a safe haven. Instead, the bombing of Monte Cassino became fodder for the German propaganda machine to smear the United States as enemies of ancient and religious traditions. In the end, the destruction of the Abbey proved to be incredibly detrimental to the Allies. In the coming months, the German forces hid in the rubble, occupied, and fortified the site. Subsequent Allied assaults up the mountain achieved little despite heavy casualties.[1]
The archives, besides a vast number of documents relating to the history of the abbey, contained some 1400 irreplaceable manuscript codices, chiefly patristic and historical. They also contained the collections of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome which had been sent to the Abbey for safety in December 1942. By great foresight on the part of Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel (a Roman Catholic), a Vienna-born German officer, and Wehrmacht surgeon Stabsarzt Dr. Maximilian Becker, (a Protestant), both from the Panzer-Division Hermann Göring, these were all transferred to the Vatican at the beginning of the battle.
