BARBO, LUDOVICO. - Reformer of Benedictine monastic life and distinguished ascetical writer, b. in Venice in 1381 or 1382, d. there in Sept. 1443, in the monastery of S. Giorgio Maggiore. Of an illustrious patrician family, in his youth he took the ecclesiastical habit and was appointed by Boniface IX commendatory abbot of the monastery of S. Giorgio in Alga, near Venice. The monastery, where the rule of St. Augustine was observed, was increased through his work by numerous vocations, among them St. Lorenzo Giustiniani, who was later its abbot general. On 20 Dec. 1408 he received by papal appointment the Benedictine abbey of S. Giustina of Padua; the B. devoted himself with admirable zeal to the spiritual reform of the monastery, after having professed the rule of St. Benedict in Rimini in the chapel of S. Prisca, in the Cathedral (3 Feb. 1409). The abbey of S. Giustina, as Benedict XV observes (AAS, 11 [1919], p. 369), through the work of the B. became the cradle of the great Benedictine reform in Italy, from which the Congregation of S. Giustina took its origin... later called Cassinese. When the B. took possession of it, it was almost depopulated of monks and in the saddest material conditions, so as to seem rather 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 opuscule in epistolary form, the B. narrates the beginnings of the new congregation, approved by Martin V in 1419. Numerous other monasteries joined the Congregation of S. Giustina, entering into the reform. The 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. Perhaps the ideas of the time concerning the supposed supremacy of the Council over the Pope determined such a conception. The B., who took part in the Council of Basel (XVII session) as one of the 4 papal legates (cf. letter of Eugene IV, 16 Dec. 1433), privately acknowledged that supremacy with an oath. The B. also had the task of the material and moral restoration of the abbey of S. Paolo in Rome.
Pope Eugene IV, by a bull dated from Bologna, 19 June 1437, elected him bishop of Treviso; in this see the B. labored much for the reform of morals and of the clergy.
More a man of action and government than of study, the B. did not leave many 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 the B. cites three kinds of prayer: vocal, meditation, contemplation, which is reached by means of well-made meditation. To facilitate the use of meditating, the subjects are divided up weekly. The Modus meditandi was composed at Treviso between 1437 and 1443, the B. being already bishop, and although addressed to the monks of the Congregation of S. Giustina, it had great influence on the Congregation of Valladolid and on the monastery of Montserrat fifty years before Garcia de Cisneros. First ed. of the work in Venice 1523: Rome 1605; Cologne 1644; reissued 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.
Bibliography6 works
Umile Bonzi da Genova