The Fall of Monasticism and the Rise of Clerical Managerialism
3rd August 2025
Monasteries are built to last not for decades or even centuries, but for millennia. A monastery is meant to remain there and make that place holy, and that is the reason why monasteries were so successful in the creation of Christendom. But consecrated life, or what the Church calls ‘religious life’—that is, life lived under special vows—underwent big changes. Those changes came about due to the adaptation of religious life in the face of moments of crisis. But in the long run, such changes probably had unhelpful consequences. The consequences to which I refer slowly changed the Christian Faith from the permanent form of a concrete and settled way of life, to a set of intangible ideas or propositions which one either agreed with or one did not.
Settled monastic orders in the Latin Church refer to their abbey as their “stability” for a reason.
The appearance of the friars marked a revolutionary change in which these new ‘monks’—free from the vow of stability—no longer remained in monasteries. They did not stay in one place to transform the area in which they’d settled, consecrating it down the centuries. These friars were on the move, wandering and preaching, turning up in cities and then disappearing again years later. They established lasting priories, but the friars moved between those priories constantly. The friars were to have no lasting attachment to a particular place and its surrounding landscape. What is more, rather than seeing this change in the Church as an unfortunate innovation necessitated by a passing crisis, new celebrity friars—including someone as influential as St. Thomas Aquinas—argued that their way of life marked the perfection of all religious life, combining as it did both contemplative and apostolic life, whereas monks were ‘disadvantaged’ by being contemplatives alone, so Aquinas argued.
By this change in the conception of a ‘consecrated person,’ the Church was set on a trajectory that ultimately unwound its mission centuries later. The friars were not farmers, artisans, and traders; they were full-time missionaries. They would come, render the faithful orthodox with their preaching, and leave. In this way, the definition of the Christian tacitly changed from a ‘liturgical person’ to a ‘person who accepts certain propositions.’ The Faith, without anyone noticing, slowly changed from the existential transfiguration of human nature and the ongoing transformation of human culture to a set of formulae requiring assent. In short, the threads of rationalism, which would later deconstruct the Church and her mission, were sewn into her most holy organ, namely the consecrated life of her religious orders.
Being a Christian changed from “what one did” to “what one believed”. Unfortunately, faith without works is dead.