SAINT OF THE DAY - JUNE 19th, 2016

In other years: St Romuald (c.951 - 1027)

He joined a Benedictine monastery but made himself unpopular there by trying to get the lax monks to mend their ways and so, with the permission of his abbot, became a wandering hermit. In a constant fight against the degenerate monasteries of the day, he founded hermitages and monasteries where a life of prayerful solitude could be truly lived. The monastery at Camaldoli, which he founded and where he remained as abbot for a number of years, became the first house of an order of hermits which still exists. But Romuald took to his wanderings once more, and died in a monastery he himself had founded at Val di Castro – as he wished, alone in his cell.