Portal:Catholicism/Patron Archive/October 6 2007
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Saint Bruno of Cologne (Cologne, c. 1030 – October 6, 1101), the founder of the Carthusian Order, personally founded the order's first two communities. He was a celebrated teacher at Reims, France and a close advisor of his former pupil, Pope Urban II.
His funeral elegies celebrate his eloquence, his poetic, philosophical, and theological talents; and his merit as a teacher is reflected in the merits of his pupils, amongst whom were Eudes of Châtillon, afterwards Pope Urban II, Rangier, Cardinal Bishop of Reggio, Robert, Bishop of Langres, and a large number of prelates and abbots.
In 1075 Bruno was appointed chancellor to the Diocese of Reims.
Bruno's first thought on leaving Reims seems to have been to place himself and his companions under the direction of an eminent solitary, Saint Robert, who had recently (1075) settled at Sèche-Fontaine, near Molesme in the Diocese of Langres, together with a band of other hermits, who were later on (in 1098) to form the Cistercian Order. After a short stay he went with six of his companions to Saint Hugh of Châteauneuf, Bishop of Grenoble. The bishop installed them himself in 1084 in a mountainous and uninhabited spot in the lower Alps of the Dauphiné, in a place named "Chartreuse", not far from Grenoble. With St. Bruno were Landuin, Stephen of Bourg and Stephen of Die, canons of St. Rufus, and Hugh the Chaplain, and two laymen, Andrew and Guerin, who afterwards became the first lay brothers. They built a little retreat where they lived isolated and in poverty, entirely occupied in prayer and study, for these men had a reputation for learning, and frequently honored by the visits of St. Hugh who became like one of themselves.
At the time, Bruno's pupil, Eudes of Châtillon, had become pope as Urban II (1088). Resolved to continue the work of reform commenced by Gregory VII, and being obliged to struggle against an antipope Guibert of Ravenna, and the Emperor Henry IV, he was in dire need of competent and devoted allies and called his former master to Rome in 1090. The place chosen in 1091 for his new retreat was in the Diocese of Squillace. Bruno died October 6, 1101.
Attributes: skull that he holds and contemplates, with a book and a cross
Patronage: Calabria
Prayer:
