"In his way, man becomes increasingly similar to Christ and achieves a true self-accomplishment as a creature made in resemblance of God", specified Benedict XVI, who mentioned in particular the three years he lived as a hermit, all alone in a cave, which has become since the Middle Ages the "heart" of the Benedictine monastery of "Sacro Speco". "The Subiaco period highlighted the Pope was for Benedict a time of maturation", where "he had to bear the three fundamental temptations of every human being: the temptation of self-accomplishment and the desire to take centre stage, the temptation of sensuality, and finally the temptation of wrath and revenge". Saint Benedict believed that, "only after vanquishing these temptations, could he have said to the other a useful word for their needs". "His soul, by now at peace said the Pontiff , could fully control the urges of the self and spread peace around himself. Only then did he decide to found his first monasteries". In the first part of today’s catechesis, mentioning the miracles worked by the Saint and told by Saint Gregory the Great, the Pope commented, off the cuff, that they show that "God is not a distant assumption on the origin of the world, but a presence in the life of the man who opens up to Him".
