BARBO, LUDOVICO. — Reformer of Benedictine monastic life and distinguished ascetical writer, b. in Venice in 1381 or 1382, d. there in September 1443, in the monastery of S. Giorgio Maggiore. Of an illustrious patrician family, he donned the ecclesiastical habit at a young age and was appointed by Boniface IX commendatory abbot of the monastery of S. Giorgio in Alga, near Venice. The monastery, where the rule of s. Augustine was observed, was enlarged through his efforts by numerous vocations, among them s. Lorenzo Giustiniani, who later became its general abbot. On 20 December 1408, by papal appointment, he received the Benedictine abbey of S. Giustina of Padua; B. devoted himself with admirable zeal to the spiritual reform of the monastery, after professing the rule of s. Benedict at Rimini in the chapel of S. Prisca, in the Cathedral (3 February 1409). The abbey of S. Giustina, as Benedict XV observes (AAS, 11 [1919], p. 369), through the work of B. became the cradle of the great Benedictine reform in Italy, from which originated the Congregation of s. Giustina... later called Cassinese. When B. took possession of it, it was almost deserted by monks and in the most wretched material condition, so that it seemed more like a stable than a dwelling made for men (De initiis Congregationis S. Iustinae de Padua, in Pez, Thesaurus anecdotorum, II, part 3, p. 269, [ed. G. Campes, pp. 13, 53]). In this epistolary pamphlet, B. recounts the beginnings of the new congregation, approved by Martin V in 1419. Numerous other monasteries joined the Congregation of S. Giustina, becoming part of the reform. B. desired a hierarchical organization for his congregation: it was governed by four visitors elected annually, who carried out the decisions of the general chapter. The local abbots were elected for a limited period by the general chapter and were subject to the visitors. This conception may have been determined by the ideas of the time concerning the alleged supremacy of the Council over the Pope. B., who took part in the Council of Basel (seventeenth session) as one of the four papal legates (cf. letter of Eugene IV, 16 December 1433), privately acknowledged this supremacy by oath. B. was also charged with the material and moral restoration of the abbey of S. Paolo in Rome.
Pope Eugene IV, by a bull dated at Bologna, 19 June 1437, elected him bishop of Treviso; in this see B. worked extensively for the reform of morals and of the clergy.
An ascetic of action and government more than of study, B. left few writings: besides the aforementioned De initiis..., the Declarationes nonnullae in regulam B. P. Benedicti pro Congregationae Valliolotanae in Hispania ad instar Cassin. instituta, published in 1595, and the brief but effective and notable
Modus meditandi et orandi, which is rather “a collection of meditations than a method of prayer properly so called” (P. Pourrat, La Spiritualité chrétienne, III, Paris 1927, p. 26). In this treatise B. cites three kinds of prayer: vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplation, which is attained through well-made meditation. To facilitate the practice of meditation, the subjects are divided by week. The Modus meditandi was composed at Treviso between 1437 and 1443, when B. was already bishop, and although addressed to the monks of the Congregation of S. Giustina, it had a great influence on the Congregation of Valladolid and on the monastery of Monserrato fifty years before Garcia de Cisneros. First ed. of the work in Venice 1523: Rome 1605; Cologne 1644; republished by the Jesuit H. Watrigant in Quelques promoteurs de la Méditation méthodique (Bibliothèque des Exercices, 59), Paris 1919. It was also published at the end of the Exercitatorium of Garcia de Cisneros, Regensburg 1856. Italian-Latin ed. in the series Scritti monastici published by the monks of Praglia, no. 3: Metodo di pregare e meditare.
Umile Bonzi da Genova