St. Scholastica

February 10 is the feast of St. Scholastica (c. 480-547), the sister of St. Benedict and the foundress of the women's branch of the Benedictine order. According to the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, she met her brother once a year at a house near his monastery at Monte Cassino, and on her last visit, in 547, she asked him to stay the night talking of heaven. When he refused — his Rule forbade him to leave the monastery — she wept, and a thunderstorm broke out that kept him by her until morning. Three days later she died.

Benedict saw her soul rise to heaven in the form of a dove, and had her body buried in the tomb he had prepared for himself at Monte Cassino. The few words Gregory gives her — "I asked you, and you would not listen; I asked my God, and he heard me" — are the foundation of her cult: the sister whose prayer was more powerful than the abbot's rule.

The Benedictine nuns look to Scholastica as their foundress, and the Benedictine women's houses — from the Abbey of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco, the first Benedictine women's house, to Mariazell and Einsiedeln — keep her feast on February 10. From Monte Cassino, where she is buried, to every Benedictine women's monastery, the feast is the day of the dove and of the sister.