Better Know a Saint: St. Pachomius

What's a hard working Egyptian fella going to do after leaving the Roman army? In Pachomius's case, it was to convert to Christianity in 314 BCE and build a new type of monastary.

Pachiomus watched Christians bring food and clothes to prison inmates at Thebes and was impressed by their behavior. After leaving the army he became a Christian, and spent several years following an elderly monk named Palemon, living the austere life of prayer and manual labor that St. Anthony of Egypt had created.

Eventually Pachiomus had an idea. Another monk, Macarius had created "larves" where monks who were unable to keep living a solitary life because of physical or mental problems could still be part of the religious community. Pachomius set about organizing these cells into a formal organization that moved individual hermits into formalized communities - the first monestaries and nunneries. To put that into religious geek-speak, monks went from living a hermitic (or eremitic lifestyle), to a communal (or cenobitic lifestyle). While St. Anthony usually gets the credit for the monastic communities as we think of them today, it was really Pachiomus who created them, on the banks of the lovely Egyptian Nile River.

He's also credited with inventing prayer rope, a descendant of the rosary.

However, St. Anthony is still the go-to guy when in comes to lost stuff. Now where did I put my Blackberry?