Our Life

Sadhu Benedict Moth (St Benedict Monastery) is a Benedictine monastery located at Maheshwarapasha in Khulna district (South-West of Bangladesh). It began its life in January 1978 when an Italian young missionary, Carlo Rubini, and a Bengali young man, Premananda Karmaker, thought of starting a Christian monastic presence in Bangladesh.

After ten years, spent in deepening the Christian and Hindu monastic experience and its possible adaptation to the present situation in the country, they purchased a suitable piece of land (at Maheshwarapasha, which means “God’s delights”) where, in 1989, they started building the small monastery that, in 1990, received recognition as a dependent monastery of Praglia Abbey (Italy).

Blessing of first stone of the Monastery (10 Feb 1989)

As with any Benedictine monastic institution the rhythm of life of the monastery follows the ancient Latin motto Ora et Labora (prayer and work).

The chapel

The monastery tries to make its contribution to the welfare of the local Church through a religious/cultural programme of its own. In this field, the most important fruit, perhaps, has been the translation from Hebrew and Greek into Bengali of the Holy Bible (the so called ‘Jubilee Bible’), published in the Jubilee Year 2000 by the Catholic Bishops Conference of Bangladesh. Other works worth mentioning are the translation into Bengali of The Liturgy of the Hours, with more than one thousand Patristic texts (published in 2004), Patristic homilies for Sundays and Feastdays, music for psalms and hymns, biblical commentaries and other texts. Through these tools, the work among catechumens too has greatly improved in quality. Moreover, since the population of the country is by and large Muslim, the monastery gives special attention to inter-religious Dialogue.

Since Bangladesh is a poor country, the monks’ humanitarian/charitable activity focuses on those levels of society that for various reasons cannot benefit from the more generally available normal commodities of life. (Needless to say that, in this field, Muslims, Hindus and Christians are all treated in the same way).

Apart from the various kinds of daily help which are difficult to quantify in detail (for instance, school-fees and books for poor students, medecines for the sick, sewing machines for widows, finantial help to poor girls in order to give them a better chance in getting married etc.), the monks’ aim has two specific targets: educational facilities (construction/repairing of college/schools) and deep tubewell digging (between 800 and 1100 feet) to provide drinkable water. The target area of this activity stretches west of the monastery for an area of about 13 km with a population of around 50000. In this area people usually drink the water that fills small ponds during the monsoon season, or water drawn from 100 feet deep tubewells. Unfortunatelly, due to arsenic, water at that level is polluted to a dramatic degree.

One of our schools and a typical pond to draw water from

St Benedict wants his monks to live lives depending not on alms but on the work of their hands, and we can say that, through the income from our dairy farm (we sell milk, manure and, occasionally, a cow or a calf) and from our garden, at least as far as our personal needs are concerned, we are self-sufficient. Nonetheless, the needs of the poor around us is not something one can easily ignore and yet by ourselves we cannot even dream to provide any amount of significant help. Visit Image Gallery to get an idea about our life and work.

Mini dairy-farm

For this reason we turn to you too, kind reader. If you wish to contribute to our work you can contact us clicking/tepping Donations at the bottom of this page.

PEACE !