“Saint Romuald was an Italian hermit born around 950 A.D. The son of aristocratic parents, Saint Romuald indulged as a lavish and thoughtless youth. Shocked by witnessing his father win a dual, Saint Romuald fled to a local abbey and entered religious life. Drawn to eremitic simplicity, he traveled through Italy reforming monasteries and eventually founded the Camaldolese Order. As Saint Peter Damian described, Saint Romuald’s goal was to, “…turn the whole world into a hermitage, and make all the multitude of the people associates of the monastic order” (divineoffice.org)
Not everyone will know that the great saint kind of more or less hermit (though admittedly super incredibly austere) not only has his feast today in the Novus Ordo, but had his feast for one year on this date in a post-tridentine calendar just a bit after the reforms. His feast was then transferred to the date of the transfer of his relics.
Accompany me, Father George David Byers, S.S.L., S.T.D., as I begin life as a Catholic Priest-Hermit by choice. Holy Souls Hermitage is dedicated to the sanctification of my fellow priests, bishops, deacons & seminarians going through the purgatory of this life or the next. Prayer and sacrifice go up, of course, for both Benedict XVI and the next Successor of Saint Peter. 
