Welcome to the new AIM website - Alliance InterMonastères.
✅ The site is available in French 🇫🇷 and is in the finalization phase in English 🇬🇧.
🕐 The site will very soon be available in German 🇩🇪, Portuguese 🇵🇹, Spanish 🇪🇸 and Italian 🇮🇹.
COMMUNITIES
1620
There are numerous communities in the world today that follow the rule of Saint Benedict. They are present on five continents and attached to the Benedictine Confederation, the CIB, the Cistercian Order (Ocist) and the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance (OCSO). Here, presented country by country, the contact details of all these communities.
World Maps of Monasteries
Select a monastery
History of monastic congregations
The Benedictine Confederation
Today, all the Benedictine monasteries are united into a group, called the Benedictine Confederation, headed by an Abbot Primate residing in Rome. This organization is relatively recent: it is due to the cadet Léon XII and dates from 1893.
Originally, Saint Benedict had not planned a structured organization between the monasteries: each lived in complete autonomy under the watchful eye of the local bishop. For various reasons, over the centuries, some have grouped together either because they were geographically close, or because they came from each other and had common observances, or for others even less so. Thus in the 9th century, under the aegis of the Carolingian monarchs and Benedict of Aniane, monasteries achieved a certain union between them with uniform customs. A century later, numerous monasteries were grouped under the aegis of that of Cluny; this grouping prefigured the real regular “Orders”.
...
Communio Internationalis Benedictinarum
(CIB)
The Communio Internationalis Benedictarum (CIB) was born in 2001 in Nairobi, Kenya, during a meeting of representatives of female Benedictine communities from around the world. It had been about thirty years since efforts had been made to bring together through a fraternal bond the nuns and sisters affiliated with the Benedictine Confederation. If each community has its own charisma and particularity, the sisters have learned to recognize and appreciate their unity in the rule of Saint Benedict and in the Benedictine tradition, which has spread across cultures and countries around the world. The CIB allowed the sisters to experience in depth and in a concrete way all the richness of the Benedictine charism, which is expressed in the life of their communities.
...