The Life of Mother Benedict Duss

The Life of Mother Benedict Duss | Preface to Mother Benedict (Mother Benedict Duss, O.S.B.): Foundress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis | Antoinette Bosco

I had the privilege of interviewing Mother Benedict Duss over a period of several years before her death on October 2, 2005, learning her story so that one day it could be told and preserved. This book would never have come about if she had not been told by her Bishop to write her autobiography and the story of the founding and development of the Abbey of Regina Laudis. I can say that, but for her obedience to the Bishop, the book would not have been written. For as I came to know the Lady Abbess (her official title), I found she was a truly private woman, not given to talking about herself and essentially reserved.

In the hundreds of hours I spent with Mother Benedict, it became my privilege to get to know this remarkable woman, who was never pretentious, pious, false or unresponsive to someone in need. If there is one quality that characterized her, it was her availability to the members of the Community. She explained that as Abbess, "you have to turn all your energy toward fulfilling the expectations of each woman who has entered. It is sometimes very difficult, but for the fertility of the life, you always have to give more of your personal substance than you are really willing to do. That is also true for the nuns here. But as the head of the Community, I have to be available all the time. People have a right to barge in, and I must be able to respond to a problem they cannot postpone. Yet, while I listen with empathy and concern for their individual problem, I must pray for the gift of discernment because always, at all times, I have to be primarily concerned with and open to the needs of the Community."

It was her complete focus on her responsibilities to the Community that made it difficult for Mother Benedict to offer what I once called "a personal profile" of herself to me, an interviewer. She did not like to turn a mirror on self-not ever. She lived the contemplative life, believing that "when the time comes to find out what you are to do, you'll be told." And she was given her marching orders to follow fifty years ago--a call from the Lord to found a Benedictine Community for women in Bethlehem, Connecti- cut! I asked her once to look back at these past fifty years and tell me how she felt now about all she had accomplished. She looked at me and, in her matter-of-fact, quiet way, answered directly, and perhaps almost a bit impatiently, "I didn't do it." This is a woman who doesn't change her story!

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