Abbot

The abbot is the head of a monastery, and the manner of his selection, election by the monks he will govern, is as significant as the authority he holds.

Elected to fatherhood

The word means father, and the abbot governs the monastic community as a father governs a household, holding real authority over its life and discipline, but he is elected by the professed monks of the house, usually for life or for a fixed term according to the constitution of the order, so his authority rises from the community rather than being imposed from above. In the Benedictine tradition the monk vows obedience to the abbot, and the abbot in turn is bound by the rule and is to consult the community, so the office joins paternal authority to a real accountability.

Autonomy of the house

Because a Benedictine monastery is autonomous and the monk is bound to it by the vow of stability, the abbot is the head of a self-governing community rather than a link in a chain of command, and there is no general above him ruling the whole order in the manner of the centralised orders. This makes the abbot office the natural focus of the independence of the monastery. The office is ancient and has at times carried great temporal power, the abbots of the greatest medieval houses ranking as lords, but its essential character remains that of the elected father of a community that has chosen him.

The tenth century Cluniac reform bound hundreds of dependent monasteries into a single centralised structure under the abbot of Cluny, a scale of authority far beyond the single self-governing house the Rule of Benedict envisages, and later medieval congregations and confederations of houses continued to experiment with degrees of central oversight that sat uneasily against the older ideal of the autonomous abbey.

The office suffered its worst corruption through the commendatory system, under which kings and popes assigned the income of an abbey to a favoured cleric, or even a layman, who held the title and drew the revenue without living in the monastery or exercising any real spiritual government over it, a practice that drained the finances and discipline of many houses across late medieval and early modern Catholic Europe. Combined with the outright abolition of monasteries at the Reformation in England, Scandinavia and parts of Germany, the office went into a long decline before nineteenth and twentieth century monastic revivals, notably the founding of the Benedictine Confederation in 1893 under an elected abbot primate, restored a coordinated but explicitly non-governing structure that left each abbot's authority over his own house intact.