St. Romwuald

Summary

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Catholic Saints Podcast – Episode: St. Romwald

Released: June 19, 2026 | Augustine Institute
Host: Dr. Jessica Yule
Guest: Dr. David Moser

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Episode Overview

This episode of the Catholic Saints podcast dives into the life and enduring legacy of St. Romwald (also known as St. Romuald), a pivotal yet often overlooked reformer in the history of Western monasticism. Through lively discussion, Dr. Jessica Yule and Dr. David Moser explore Romwald’s origins, his spiritual journey, his unique approach to monastic life, and what modern Catholics can learn from his example of contemplation, silence, and reform.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Historical Context and Early Life

• Date and Place: Born around 951 in Ravenna, Italy, died in 1027 (01:35).
• Era: Lived during a time of significant political instability and monastic corruption in pre-High Middle Ages Italy (02:09).
• Background: "Romwald grew up in a time of political instability... There was a lot of corruption in the monasteries, yet a growing desire for reform and renewal." – Dr. Moser (02:09)

2. Formative Crisis and Religious Awakening

• Witnessed his father commit a murder in a duel when he was a young man, a traumatic event that left a deep mark and led him to seek repentance and spiritual reparation (03:14).
• "He really felt compunction for his father's deed, and he sought to do reparation for his father's sins." – Dr. Moser (03:26)

3. Monastic Career and the Call to Reform

• Entered a Benedictine monastery but was disturbed by the lack of discipline and sought a more solitary approach to spirituality (03:52).
• Revived eremitical (hermit) life in the West, combining solitude with Benedictine structure (04:28, 05:46).
• "He wanted to enable people to find God in the lifestyle of a hermit, but also to be able to share some of the rules, the rigor, and the structure of Benedictine life." – Dr. Moser (05:46)

4. Defining Monastic Styles

• Eremiticism: Solitary monastic living, following the tradition of St. Anthony (04:29).
• Cenobiticism: Communal monastic life, more familiar in Western Christianity (04:55).
• Romwald’s innovation: A hybrid model combining solitude and communal rigor, leading to the founding of the Camaldolese Order.

5. Founding the Camaldolese and The Rule of St. Romwald

• Founded a hermitage at Camaldoli, Tuscany, and authored a brief but profound "Rule" for monastic life (05:52).
• Full Text of the Rule: Read on-air (06:08).

“Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms. Never leave it... Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.”
– St. Romwald’s Rule (06:08)

• Emphasized: Personal solitude, the Psalms, interior vigilance, and readiness for grace.

6. Legacy and Spiritual Impact

• Camaldolese order persists to this day, practicing Romwald’s hybrid of solitude and community (07:28).
• Romwald stressed obedience even for hermits—a rare stance for the time (08:30).
• “He felt a deep anxiety and a longing to bear fruit for souls. ... You would think he was trying to turn the whole world into a hermitage.” – Quoting St. Peter Damian’s biography (09:10)
• Mention in Dante: Romwald is praised in Dante’s Divine Comedy as a paragon of monastic reform (11:20).

7. Relics, Writings, and Miracles

• Primary biographical source is by St. Peter Damian, with only the brief Rule attributed to Romwald himself (10:10).
• No substantial collection of his writings; Rule possibly transmitted through others (10:10).
• Remembered for "deep holiness," working miracles, healings, prophecies, and resisting the demonic, typical of medieval saints’ veneration (12:08).

8. Spiritual Lessons for Today

• Romwald’s journey illustrates growth from “servile fear” (fear of punishment) to “filial fear” (loving reverence), a pattern relevant to anyone beginning the Christian life from a place of anxiety, guilt, or compunction (13:00).
• Emphasized silence and interior solitude as antidotes to the distractions of modern life; recommended praying the Psalms as a concrete path for deepening the spiritual life (14:45).

“If we used our phones, [what] if we opened them up to the Psalter more often than to social media?” – Dr. Moser (14:45)

• The choice to respond to crisis by opening oneself to God rather than despair (14:19, 14:45).
• Encouragement to seek the “interior desert” to encounter God.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Book Opening Line
  “Against you, unclean world, I protest.”
  – St. Peter Damian, opening line of The Life of St. Romwald (03:12)

• On Solitude and Psalms
  “Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it.…The path you must follow is in the Psalms.”
  – St. Romwald’s Rule (06:08)

• Modern Application
  “I think part of that is another lesson we can learn from him, is the importance of silence...What if we put our phones down? Or at least if we used our phones, open them up to the Psalter more often than we do social media.”
  – Dr. Moser (14:45)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:20 – Introduction to St. Romwald and his context
• 01:35 – Historical placement: who and where he lived
• 02:09 – Summary of the political and ecclesial state of Italy
• 03:14 – Romwald’s life-changing trauma and vocation
• 04:29 – Explanation of eremitic and cenobitic monasticism
• 05:52 – Founding Camaldoli and St. Romwald’s Rule
• 06:08 – Complete reading of St. Romwald’s Rule
• 07:28 – Lasting legacy: Camaldolese Order
• 09:10 – Biographical insights from St. Peter Damian
• 11:20 – Romwald’s mention in Dante’s Divine Comedy
• 13:00 – Spiritual lessons and psychological transformation
• 14:45 – Application of silence and prayer for the modern Catholic

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Takeaway Message

St. Romwald’s life is a model of reform, interior renewal, and holy perseverance. His journey reminds Catholics that lasting change often originates in moments of compunction and crisis, that silence and prayer are timeless needs, and that the search for God sometimes entails forging new paths between solitude and community. His Rule remains a succinct guide not only for monks but for all Christians seeking to “sit in paradise” amid the distractions of the world.

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St. Romwald, pray for us!

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Hello and welcome to Catholic Saints, the podcast about the lives of the saints and their legacy for the church and for us. I'm Dr. Jessica Yule, and I'm joined today by Dr. David Moser. Welcome and thanks for being with us on the podcast to talk about St. Romwald.

[Dr. David Moser]

It's great to be with you again, Jessica. Yes, I'm very excited to talk about Saint Romwald is a name that's fun to say. Romwald.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Yes. It's a great name. So before we get started, tell us a little bit, David, about what you're teaching in the graduate school this semester.

[Dr. David Moser]

I am teaching Jesus and the Gospels. It's one of our four foundational courses you have to take here if you take a Master of Arts degree with us. I love that class because we go very carefully through all four of the Gospels and look at how each of them witness to Jesus in their own distinctive way. There's a lot of things. Sometimes people read the Gospels and they think, oh, this kind of all is the same thing. Right? Nope. Wrong. There's a really specific message each one wants to convey, so that all four together show us something really unique about Jesus.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

That's fascinating. Today we're going to be talking about a medieval saint, Saint Romwalt, and his

[Dr. David Moser]

feast day is June 19th.

[Podcast Host]

Yay.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Yes, indeed. Right before summer starts. So let's go ahead and jump into some of the details about his life. When did he live? Exactly.

[Dr. David Moser]

So he was born around the year 951, which I don't know about you, but I don't know much about what happened around that time. You know, like nine hundreds. Right, 951. And he died in the year 1027.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Okay, so not quite the high Middle Ages, but. But. Or.

[Dr. David Moser]

Getting there.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Getting there, yes, getting there. And where did he live?

[Dr. David Moser]

So he lived in modern day Italy. He was born in Ravenna, which is in the northern part of modern Italy and still there today. Yeah.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Okay. And what. What were some important events that marked his life or that he maybe took part in or.

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah. So Romwald grew up in a time of political instability in Italy, which, you know, there's the Holy Roman Empire. There's a lot of different warring factions. There was a lot of corruption in the monasteries, yet there was a growing desire for reform and renewal in the monastic orders at the time among clergy and the laity. So Romwald precedes some of the major reforms that would take place in the 10th. Sorry, 11th and 12th centuries with the Gregorian reforms and then the Cluny reforms in the monasteries. But he was a reformer himself. He really was a precursor. Forerunner to these reforms that would come in the following centuries.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Wow. So tell us a little bit of his story. Who was Romwald?

[Dr. David Moser]

So his biography was written by St. Peter Damian, who lived after his time. So they overlapped by about 20 years. And the very first line of the biography written by Saint Peter, Damien of Saint Romwald, the life of Saint Romwald is what it's called. The very first line is against you, Unclean world. I protest.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Wow. Talk about a first line.

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah, he comes on the scene, swinging right early in his. He witnessed his father murder a man in a duel. So he was a witness to a horrific thing, and this actually shook him to the core.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

How old was he? Do we know?

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah, I don't recall how old he was. It was very early on. He was a young man, though, so the biography states, it being very early in his life. And so he really felt compunction for his father's deed, and he sought to do reparation for his father's sins. So. And I think, in some sense, to maybe deal with his own sense of instability at coming and witnessing this. So he joined a Benedictine monastery of Saint Apollinaris in Italy. But when he entered, he was disturbed by the lack of discipline he saw there, the corruption, and he wanted more solitude. He felt like he really needed to do business with the Lord, I guess, if you might put it that way, wasn't really able to because of the lack of discipline that he saw there. And he sought more solitude. Like, he wanted to do business with the Lord more on his own. He spend more time alone. And so he revived what is called a hermitage, or the way of being a hermit. And so in order to define that, maybe it might be helpful to define the different kinds of monasticism.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah. So there's two different forms of monasticism going back to the third century with St. Anthony. He's kind of taken to be the first one who lives as a monk. There's hermitage or eremiticism. This is where the monk will go live by himself. This is what St. Anthony was famous for, if you know anything about him. And Kenobiticism. Okay.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Which is a really fun word.

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah, Right. Kenobidicism, it's kind of hard to say.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Yeah.

[Dr. David Moser]

But this is communal monastic life. It's what we are more familiar with with monasteries, right. It's a lot of monks who live together in a common life. They pray together, they worship together, they work together, and so on. So hermitage or again, living as a hermit was an ancient tradition, but it was not so common in the West. It was common more in the East. There was a renewal at the time of Saint Romwald, though, of thinking about how we could implement hermit lifestyle in monasticism in the west, though. And so Saint Romwald wanted to find a way to preserve the best of both of these traditions. He wanted to enable people to find God in the lifestyle of a hermit, but also to be able to share some of the rules, the rigor, and the structure of Benedictine life in the monastery.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

That sounds like having the best of both worlds.

[Dr. David Moser]

I think that's what he wanted.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Yeah. So then how did it go for him? What happened?

[Dr. David Moser]

Well, he founded a hermitage at Camaldoli in Tuscany. Okay. And he wrote a short rule to guide communal life there. It's called the Rule of St. Romwald.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Do we still have it?

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah, we do actually have it. And I can read you the entire thing on this podcast.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Wow. Okay, let's go.

[Dr. David Moser]

Let's do it. You're like, oh, this is gonna be a long episode. It's actually not. It's actually not very long at all. Okay, so here is the rule. Okay? So St. Rum Waltz founds this community, and he writes this quote. Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms. Never leave it. If you have just come to the monastery and in spite of your goodwill, you cannot accomplish what you want. Take every opportunity to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind. And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up. Hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more. Realize above all that you are in God's presence and stand there with the attitude of the one who stands before the emperor. Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him. And that's it.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

That is amazing. I would love. Oh, my goodness.

[Dr. David Moser]

It's important to remember, though, that he presumes the Benedictine rule. So he's taking the Benedictine rule on, but he's adding this interpretation of it here in this paragraph I just read you. That's St. Romwald's rule. It's like an expansion, perhaps, of Benedict's rule.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Okay. So they're doing what St. Benedict had them do, but then this is almost a gloss on it or an expansion of it.

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah. Notice how he speaks of reading the Psalms as the key to Benedictine life. Right. The hours. But he stresses that, you know, monks should do this in their cells. Living alone for large periods of the day. Yeah. And engaging in prayer. And so out of this, actually, the modern Kemal Dal order was founded. So there's actually an order of Benedictines today, it's a bit smaller, that practice this hybrid lifestyle to this very day. The Kamal d', Elys, they're an order of Benedictines. And so if you see the post nominal, you know, after religious last name, you know, you get OSB Right. Order of Saint Benedict. For the Cistercians, you get osb, Cist, or C I, S, T, period. For Cistercian, their post nominal is O, S, B, cam, C, A, M. Yeah, the Camalvalese.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

So how is this kind of a life where there's this hybrid different from, say, the Carmelites, who started also as hermits and then came together as a community? Are they very similar to each other, this. These two?

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah, you know, I'd need to think more about that to be able to answer that. Well, but one thing I will say is the comal delis emphasize lectio divina, daily reading of the Bible, continuous prayer and silence in hermit cells, but then also gathering for common worship throughout the day and serving one another in the community. I think St. Ronald really believed that hermits needed the monastic virtue of obedience. And you can't really experience that on your own. On your own. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you can say, well, yeah, well, I'll do what I feel like doing.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Right.

[Dr. David Moser]

My hermit lifestyle. No, you need some accountability there. That's actually how God created us.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

So did he have a lot of brothers who joined him? What happened after he founded this?

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah, he had small groups of hermits that joined him. He founded several hermitages throughout Italy at this time. He would go throughout the rest of his life founding and maintaining hermitages, small groups of men who would live together. Peter Damian, in his biography, said that, quote, romwald could not bear to remain sterile. He felt a deep anxiety and a longing to bear fruit for souls. And he kept searching for a place where he could do so. So he kept moving. Okay. And then he also writes, quote, you would think he was trying to turn the whole world into a hermitage and to involve the entire church in his project of monastic reform. So he was deeply passionate about this.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Do we know if he had, like, a sister order? You know, how St. Francis and St. Clair or St. Dominic and St. Catherine? Was there a woman's counterpart to this?

[Dr. David Moser]

That's a great question. I don't know about that, but I would need to look into that.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

And do we have any other writings from him besides his rule?

[Dr. David Moser]

No other writings. And even so, I'm not even entirely sure if the rule comes directly from his own mouth. I mean, it comes from him, but to what extent? The text, traditions, where who wrote it down and so on. These are the things the scholars can debate, right?

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dr. David Moser]

It's not entirely clear to me, but nothing else that I'm aware of, we have of his.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Was he known for any great miracles?

[Dr. David Moser]

He was known for his deep holiness. So one of the things that this gets a little bit into his legacy.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

That's okay. That's a good segue.

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah. We can talk about his legacy now. Right. He was like a lot of these medieval saints, Right. They didn't leave a lot of writings behind, if any at all. They were remembered by their biographers. Saint Romwald, though, was remembered for generations, centuries, indeed, after. So that for his rigor, his seriousness, his devotion to the Church, and his commitment to the renewal of monastic life and spiritual reform everywhere. There's actually a line where he's mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy. So at this one crucial point, when St. Benedict is speaking, he praises Romwald. He says, here in paradise is Marinus. This is a comrade of, and here are my brothers who kept steadfast hearts and planted their feet within the cloister walls. So Dante's Divine Comedy, he's looking back on the memory of Saint Romwald centuries before and remembering the great contribution that he left through his own holiness. He recovered this ideal of the hermit for medieval Europe and really insisted on the importance of contemplation and prayer. And he was able to do that through his own life, his own witness. He actually did a lot of work to reform monasteries, encouraging rulers to repent from their sins. His offers were often resisted. He was kind of a combative person. From what people remember of him from

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

that opening line of the biography, I

[Dr. David Moser]

would think so, yeah. So he sees worldliness. He doesn't want to have anything to do with it, including when other people are engaged in worldliness, I guess. So. He was also, according to the tradition, a powerful worker of healings and prophecies and battler of demons and all kinds of good things that you see in medieval biographies of saints.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Did rulers come to him, or did he seek them out?

[Dr. David Moser]

That's a good question. I'd have to look more into that. It seems like it was both and. But primarily him confronting the rulers of his time with the need to repent.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Yeah, yeah. That's something that a real prophet does. It's a gift, I think. And then since he has that, and then he also has that, the going out and renouncing the world. I mean, they kind of seem to go together in this life of a prophet. What can he teach us today?

[Dr. David Moser]

Yeah, that's a great question. And I was thinking about this in preparation. I think one of the striking things about Saint Romwald's life is that his journey begins pursuing the hermit lifestyle, pursuing a life dedicated to God entirely. It's actually begun by guilt. It's begun by witnessing his father executing another man in cold blood, you know, in this duel. And I think that's interesting because a lot of us get started on our Christian path, maybe at a sense of, you know, what theologians call servile fear, the fear that I'm going to be punished. I would say, you know, I can't read his mind, but it seems like Saint Romwald might have been motivated to some extent about the same kind of fear of punishment that he needed to do reparation for his father's sins, because they would redound to him. And that's not where really where we want to end up, though. We want to end up with what the Church calls filial fear, the fear of respect, of the love that a son or daughter has for their parent. And what we see in Saint Romwald's life, I think, is a move from this servile fear to filial fear throughout the course of his life. And so that should be encouragement to us that even if we get started in kind of a spiritually maybe questionable place, we don't really understand fully God can take that and work with it.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

Yeah. And really he had a choice right at that moment of crisis, and he flung himself into the hands of God. He could have completely gone the other way. He could have despaired, or he could have embrace the life of his father and become hardened. I mean, there was definitely a moment there, I think, probably of choice. And maybe for all of us, we have those moments, and do we fling ourselves into the arms of God when it comes to it?

[Dr. David Moser]

And I think part of that is another lesson we can learn from him, is the importance of silence. It's something that hermits and the monastic writers can teach us, is the Importance of silence. Our world today is so distracting. All of us know this. You might be listening to a podcast and that's a bit of a relief for you, but we're constantly being bombarded with information and we often are not very good at saying no to shutting that out. And I think Saint Romwald can teach us the importance of the interior life. And as many of the saints already teach us, but especially praying the Psalms. If you noticed in St. Romwald's Rule that I read to you, he mentioned several times the importance of praying the Psalms, letting the Psalms be your guide. What if we put our phones down? Or at least if we used our phones, open them up to the Psalter more often than we do social media. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people talk about this, but it's important for us to think about that. If we're going to be Christians, we've got to have that interior relationship with the Lord. And that's not going to happen so easily if we're distracted all the time.

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

No, we have to be comfortable with the silence, just sitting in the silence. And I mean, when was the last time we actually heard nothing? Like even now we could sit here and we could probably hear things going on outside. We could hear the air conditioner motor. When was the last time we heard just nothing? And so maybe very rare. Very rare. Yeah. And so we can learn from St. Romwald maybe to seek out some of that, as much of that silence as we can so we can really encounter the Lord in our own interior deserts. So. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been fascinating.

[Dr. David Moser]

Thanks for having me to learn more

[Dr. Jessica Yule]

from him and Saint Romwalt. Pray for us.

[Podcast Host]

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