The Office Corruption Nearly Destroyed Before Reform Revived It

The tenth century Cluniac reform bound hundreds of dependent monasteries into a single centralised structure under the abbot of Cluny, a scale of authority far beyond the single self-governing house the Rule of Benedict envisages, and later medieval congregations and confederations of houses continued to experiment with degrees of central oversight that sat uneasily against the older ideal of the autonomous abbey.

The office suffered its worst corruption through the commendatory system, under which kings and popes assigned the income of an abbey to a favoured cleric, or even a layman, who held the title and drew the revenue without living in the monastery or exercising any real spiritual government over it, a practice that drained the finances and discipline of many houses across late medieval and early modern Catholic Europe. Combined with the outright abolition of monasteries at the Reformation in England, Scandinavia and parts of Germany, the office went into a long decline before nineteenth and twentieth century monastic revivals, notably the founding of the Benedictine Confederation in 1893 under an elected abbot primate, restored a coordinated but explicitly non-governing structure that left each abbot's authority over his own house intact.