The English Benedictine Congregation (EBC) unites autonomous Roman Catholic Benedictine communities of monks and nuns and is technically the oldest of the nineteen congregations that are affiliated in the Benedictine Confederation. The EBC claims technical canonical continuity with a congregation of Benedictine abbeys in England erected by the Holy See in 1216, and which ceased to exist at the dissolution of the monasteries in 1535–1540. The actual origins of the present congregation lay with Catholic English expatriates in France, the Low Countries and Italy at the start of the 17th century, and the first monastery was founded at Douai in 1606; this is the ancestor of the present Downside Abbey. English exiles also joined the Italian Cassinese Congregation, and in 1607 two of these were "aggregated" to the extinct English congregation by the last surviving member of it, Dom Sigebert Buckley. He had been a monk of the Westminster Abbey re-founded by Queen Mary I of England, but dissolved again by Elizabeth I in 1550. The EBC's claim of continuity depends on this deed of aggregation, rather than survival of monastic life after the Dissolution. More information...
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