St. Benedict’s Monastery at Cebu is established at Corte, Carmen in the Archdiocese of Cebu, in a mountainous area with a panoramic natural landscape. It is about 47 Km. north of Cebu city and 6 Km uphill from Carmen town, in a small village named CORTE. The monastery belongs to the Sylvestrine Congregation, a monastic reform movement in the Benedictine monastic world that took place in the eastern-central Italy in the early 13th century. The Philippine mission was opened under the patronage of the Abbot General and the General Curia in 1999 by the monks of the Conventual Priory of St. Joseph Makkiyad, India. God in his providence has made the community grow with native vocations from the Philippines. The monastery has been raised to the status of a Foundation in the year 2005 and will become a Conventual Priory once it has sufficient members and means for existence.

Today the monastery is a centre of prayer, confession, counselling, healing and pilgrimage with hundreds of pilgrims flocking to the monastery, Our Lady of Manaoag Rosary Center, Divine Mercy Center and the Oratory of St. Pedro Calungsod.

The Apostolic Pro-Nuncio of Sri Lanka, Msgr. Oswaldo Padilla, (a Filipino from Cebu), who knew the Sylvestrine monks’ monastic and Apostolic zeal in the Island of Srilanka invited the Abbot General of the Sylvestrine Congregation Rev. Andrea Panthaloni, to open a monastery in the Philippines. The first contact to this effect was in made in the year 1997, when the Archbishop of Cebu His Eminence Ricardo J. Cardinal Vidal, welcomed the monks to the Island of Philippines whose love, interest and concern for the Benedictines made possible our choice for the island of Cebu.

In 1999 when the first two monks reached Cebu, it was Mr. Virginio Villamor, the Mayor of the Municipality of Carmen, who graciously offered the monks a house in the town to stay. His family owned many hectors of land in Carmen and he had agreed to offer the monks land for the monastery. The city of Carmen did not have many religious communities at that time and so it was also in view of assistance to the Catholic population in this area that the monks were called to Carmen. The land offered by the Mayor was found unsuitable for a monastery and the monks had to buy land. The search for a suitable land for the construction of the monastery was a difficult task. The first purchase was about four hectares of land in 1999 and there the monks built a humble residence and it was blessed on July 15, in the same year, by the then two Parish Priests of the two nearby Parishes, Fr. Henry Visitacion of St. Augustin’s Parish, Carmen and Fr. Gilberto Guardiario of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish in Cantumog. The Church dedicated to St. Benedict was completed and consecrated on the 1st of August, 2002. After the purchase of some adjacent property to the land already purchased, the first Sylvestrine house in the Philippines, St.Benedict’s Monastery was blessed on 8 December, 2005.