Are Cistercians Benedictines?
Cistercians follow the Rule of St. Benedict as a practical guide to live the Gospel. But organizationally, Cistercians are different from Benedictines and emphasize a different perspective on the Rule. I’ll have to give you a short history lesson here. At the end of the 11th century, some Benedictine monks in Burgundy (eastern France, nowadays) wanted to live a simpler monastic life and follow the Rule more closely. They also wanted to be a little more disengaged from their social system and its privileges. Ultimately, they founded a monastery at Cîteaux, which, in the next century, had generated hundreds of monasteries throughout Europe with distinctive customs and religious habit.
