Catholic Dictionary Author:William E. Addis, Thomas Arnold Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ABBOT intervention in elections, but the right of the monks is solemnly recognised in the body of the canon law. In the West, as the endowments of monasteries... more » increased, temporal princes and lords usurped the right of appointing abbots in the larger monasteries, no less than of nominating bishops to the sees ; our own history and that of Germany is full of stories of disputes thence arising. [See Investiture.] At the Council of Worms in 1122 Pope Calixtus obtained from the emperor the renunciation of the claim to invest with ring and crosier the persons nominated to ecclesiastical dignities. The first article of Magna Charta (1215) provides that the English Church shall be free: by which, among other things, the right of monks to choose their own abbots was understood to be conceded. Practically, the patronage of the larger English abbeys for two centuries before the Reformation was divided by a kind of amicable arrangement between the Pope and the king. St. Benedict. (480-543), the patriarch of Western monachism, allows in his rule (which from its greater elasticity superseded other rules which were for a time in competition with it [see Benb- DicrnfES; Rcxe, Religious]) a large discretion to the abbots of his convents, who were to modify many things in iccordance with the exigencies of climate and national customs. Such modifications led of course in time to relaxation, the reaction against which led to reforms. A curious report of the discussion between the monks of Molesme and their abbot Robert (1075), who wished to restore among them the full observance of the rule of St. Benedict, may be read in the eighth book of Ordericus Vitalis. -Sot prevailing, St. Robert, with twelve companions, left Molesme and founded Wteaux, under a reformed observance. [ClSTEBCIANS.] T...« less