Benedict’s Rule and the Last Stand for America’s Cities

My Kindle’s a cluttered attic, stuffed with a few books I pick at like a vulture when the mood strikes. Nothing I’d sink into, just odds and ends for those moments when the world’s noise gets too shrill.

One of them’s E. Michael Jones’ Benedict’s Rule: The Rise of Ethnicity and the Fall of Rome, a slim volume that’s less a book than a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the ruins of our so-called civilization. Jones argues that Benedict, that old monk, didn’t just save the West after Rome’s imperial carcass collapsed: he and his followers scooped up its soul as the toga-clad bureaucrats fled. There’s a twist, of course, something about “the rise of ethnicity,” but so far, it’s a tale of Rome’s rot and the monasteries that rose from its ashes like stubborn weeds.

Jones kicks off with a gut-punch parallel: Rome’s fall mirrors America’s slow-motion implosion. Just as Rome hollowed itself out chasing far-flung provinces, America’s rotting from the inside while its overlords obsess over deserts and jungles half a world away from Akron. The proof’s in our urban wastelands—those inner cities where hope’s been paved over by neglect and the flickering neon of dollar stores.

Jones has a knack for making you pause, even if his ideas sometimes skid close to the third rail. Is he an anti-Semite? I don’t know, and I haven’t dug into the evidence. If I swore off every book that might harbor a dangerous thought, I’d have to burn my own journals . . . and half my brain.

Here’s the kicker: Jones thinks monks could save us again. Not in some misty-eyed medieval rerun, but right now, in the boarded-up heart of our cities.

He points to Father Groeschel’s grey friars, those tough-as-nails Franciscans who brought a pulse back to the South Bronx. Jones’ plan is dirt-simple: hand over a few abandoned parish buildings in Philly, Detroit, or Baltimore to a couple of Benedictine monks. Let them turn those crumbling shells into monasteries, oases where young Catholic couples could live cheap and lean, guided by a 21st-century take on Benedict’s Rule. It’s a vision of life rooted in discipline and community, not the strip-mall sprawl of our consumerist fever dream.

Of course, it’s not that easy . . . or cheap. Sure, the Church could deed the buildings for a dollar, but the rehab costs would bankrupt a small nation, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act and housing codes written by bureaucrats who’ve never swung a hammer. And then there’s the suffocating environmental red tape: groundwater contamination, asbestos, or some other ghost of industrial sin could kill the whole thing before it starts. You’d think an old church would be clean, but in this litigious hellscape, nothing’s sacred.

Still, Jones’ idea isn’t some Don Quixote fantasy. It’s got teeth.

Picture it: a few stubborn monks, a handful of young families, and a derelict parish turned into a fortress of sanity amid the urban decay. It could spark something—maybe save a neighborhood, maybe more. In a country choking on its own excess, where every solution comes with a corporate logo or a government stamp, this feels like a faint signal from a better world. Hope’s a fragile thing, but it’s stubborn, too.

And that’s the real lesson here. Our cities aren’t just crumbling brick and asphalt. They’re the canary in the coal mine for a civilization that’s forgotten how to live. Jones’ monks aren’t just a fix for Detroit or Philly; they’re a blueprint for clawing back what we’ve lost.

We’re not going to save America with another app or a trillion-dollar bailout. It’s going to take sweat, faith, and a few crazy ideas that sound like they belong in a history book. Benedict did it once, when the world was darker than ours. Maybe it’s time we dust off his playbook and get to work before the lights go out for good.