My Catholic google-fu is failing me. I’m trying to remember which saint was considered to be such a living exemplar of The Rule of his/her order that it was said if the Rule were lost, it could be reconstructed by observing him/her.
Was it St. Benedict? Or maybe St. Therese de Lisieux?
I’m hoping some ole-timey Catholic will remember this off the top of their head.
Read more at the Wiki link above. It’s pretty interesting. They’re REALLY detailed. The Rule of St. Benedict became the foundation for many religious orders, i.e., people who live in community and pretty much have to get along, since they’re bound together for life.
The Rule of the monastery (or abbey) in question. Each order of monks or nuns has a “Rule” (for example - the Rule of St. Benedict Rule of Saint Benedict - Wikipedia) which describes how the order works (what happens at what times of day and what times of year, what behavior is required, and what behavior is forbidden, etc.).
To answer the OP’s question, I’ve seen fictional nuns describes as being the Rule personified - for example in Rumer Godden’s “In this House of Brede” but I’m not aware of a real world example.
Every order, and every monastery in every order, has a Rule, but absent a qualifier, “The Rule” is most likely to mean the Rule of St. Benedict. And the saint in question would therefore almost certainly be a Benedictine monk. Unfortunately that doesn’t narrow it down very much.
In my Catholic high school(run by the Norbertines, Order of the Praemonstratensians[care to guess what THEIR nickname was?])*, we had a few teachers who were “Black Franciscans,” friars(they wore black cassocks, hence their more common name) who had the letters T.O.R. appended to their names. That stood for Third Order Regulars, but we sacrilegiously changed it to Tired Of Religion. They seemed pretty “worldly” to us, so the epithet fit.
There’s been some mention of St. Francis of Assisi, but none of his sister, who founded the Poor Clares, historically an exemplary organization. Might Clare fill the bill?
For those of you who didn’t care to play along, the Order of Monstrous Pretensions was right on the money.
I’d vote for St Francis. Dude was so humble, he refused to become a priest nor to have any official rank within his own bloody order. Getting canonized after that must have really ticked him off.
She wasn’t his sister unless you were speaking in spiritual terms. Francis of Assisi was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone; Francesco “the French one” as nickname because he’d been born while his dad was in France on business. Clare of Assisi was born Ciara (=Clare) Sciffi. In both cases, the “of Assisi” refers to where they were from.