Saint Benedict, a former law student in Rome in early 500s had gone off and become a conventional monk living in a cave in the wilderness. After having failed at creating a monastic community with a bunch of guys who had come to him looking for leadership (they had unfortunately conceived of being a monk as being a "bum for Jesus" who could be fed and paid for by the local populace). After meditating on this failure for a long time, he created a new community years later, this time under the Rule that he had written, one of the great spiritual documents of the Church's history, a rule that took the spiritual orientation of monasticism away from individual spiritual prowess and made the "hard work" of monasticism living in community, realizing the simple human and spiritual truth that it is easier to "love" people if you don't have to deal with them, but that the love that actually has to live with people is a much more profound and real love.
If this is the model of our new Pope, that should be encouraging in itself.
