Fontavellana, Abbey of

FONTAVELLANA, ABBEY OF. - The hermitage of S. Croce di F. A. beneath Monte Carria (Marche) is described by Dante (Par., XXI).

The date of its foundation is uncertain: Grandi inclines toward the year 979; Mittarelli toward 977.

The first pontifical document in favor of F. A. dates back to Sylvester II in 1003. The original construction was eremitical: some cells with the small church and other quarters indispensable to the life of hermits. To St. Peter Damian are owed the construction of the cloister, which has partly survived, from the primitive cenobium, and of the church enlarged in 1171 and in the 13th century, in Romanesque style with slightly Gothic arches, with a single nave, with a raised presbytery where three altars of the 12th and 13th centuries are still preserved. In 1795 it was covered over with stuccoes and plaster, and in 1940 it was restored to its primitive state with some remodellings in local stone.

The Chapter house, likewise Romanesque, is of the 12th century, and the guests' hall of the 13th century, in its original architecture, with two orders of windows, awaits being freed from the superstructures of the 1700s.

The library had its beginning through the work of St. Peter Damian, who in Op. XIV gives the list of the books bought by him himself. The legal collection that took the name "colletto Avellana" has remained famous. The very rich archive is to be found almost complete at the Vatican. Only some documents have remained at F. A. along with a few precious codices. The treasury was for the most part made up of the offerings of the emperor Frederick (1177). The inventory of precious objects of 1425 is imposing, but they thus slowly perished through the work of commendatory abbots. Worthy of note is the Byzantine staurotheca brought by Cardinal Zurla to F. A. from Venice in 1833.

F. A. enjoyed exemption from the very beginning; St. Gregory VII, in homage to his friend St. Peter Damian, wished it placed under the protection of the Holy See. It grew into a Congregation with him until it had under itself more than 100 churches and monasteries. It declined in the 14th century and in 1325 was transformed from a hermitage into an abbey. In 1569 it was subjected to the general of Camaldoli. Despite the suppressions of the last century, today it is rising again to new life.

F. A. was born a hermitage according to the orientation of St. Romuald, with the personal imprint of St. Peter Damian. The life was one of almost uninterrupted prayer, of penance, fasts, vigils, hair shirts, disciplines, metanoias, of solitude in the eremitical cells distant one from another, of apostolic zeal.

F. A. more than the other Romualdine hermitages constituted a reaction to the ecclesiastical and monastic decadence of the time. Without renouncing the Benedictine Rule, it accepted its spirit and integrated its practice with the principles of Eastern monasticism in a cenobitic-eremitical synthesis in which the personality of the individual found full spiritual expression.

Its organization therefore tended to form hermits and to have free hermitages, detaching them from the monasteries or making the latter serve the former in a congregational system or of simple mixed communities, according to opportunity. The influence exercised by F. A. was enormous, for the Gregorian reform, on moral customs, on the culture of the clergy, on the use of property, which was accepted and then ceded in emphyteusis to the poor for a derisory sum, on the spiritual life brought back to its heights in the fundamental concepts of expiation of sin and contemplation of the mysteries of Christ, of spiritual fraternal charity (years of penance) for the dead and corporal for the living. It prepared and built on its part the rebirth of the 13th and 14th centuries, including the spirituality of the Mendicant Orders.

Guido Monaco (1050), in all probability, was and died at F. A.; St. Ubald resided there frequently. From F. A. came 54 bishops and about 76 men illustrious for holiness, among them St. John of Lodi (1105), St. Raniero (1180), St. Rinaldo (1225), St. Albertino (1294).