Saint Bruno, Confessor

Saint Bruno was born about the year 1030 at Cologne, in the Rhineland. Gifted in mind, he pursued his studies and became a celebrated teacher at the cathedral school of Reims, where he was esteemed for his learning and his uprightness, and numbered among his pupils men who would rise to high place in the Church. Yet, in the midst of honour and success, his heart was drawn toward a life hidden in God, away from the cares and ambitions of the world.

The flight to solitude

Resolving to give himself wholly to God, Saint Bruno renounced his offices and his prospects and, with a few like-minded companions, sought a place of solitude. Guided, as the tradition relates, by Saint Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, he and his companions came in the year 1084 to a high and remote valley in the mountains of the Chartreuse, and there built a humble hermitage. In this wilderness they gave themselves to silence, prayer, fasting, and the labour of their hands, living as solitaries yet bound together in charity under a common rule. From this beginning grew the Carthusian Order, which has ever sought to keep the spirit of its founder.

The manner of life that Saint Bruno established was one of singular austerity and recollection: the monks dwelt in separate cells, meeting for the sacred liturgy and otherwise keeping silence and solitude, that nothing might draw them from the contemplation of God. So faithfully has this way been preserved that the Carthusians are honoured as an order that, in the words long used of them, has never needed to be reformed, because it has never been deformed.

In the service of the Church

Such was the renown of Saint Bruno’s wisdom and holiness that the Sovereign Pontiff, who had been his pupil, summoned him to Rome to aid him by his counsel. Bruno obeyed, leaving for a time his beloved solitude; but the call of the contemplative life remained strong in him, and he was at length permitted to withdraw again, founding a second hermitage in the mountains of Calabria, in southern Italy. There he passed his last years in the prayer and penance he had always loved.

Saint Bruno died in his Calabrian solitude on the sixth of October, 1101. He left no writings prescribing his Order’s observance, wishing rather that his sons should learn from his example; yet his name has ever been venerated. The collect of his feast asks that, through the intercession of Saint Bruno, we who are caught up in the midst of the world’s affairs may be drawn to the love of heavenly things. In him the Church honours a learned man who chose the better part, and who taught, above all by his life, the worth of silence, solitude, and the contemplation of God.

Patronage

He is venerated as the founder of the Carthusian Order and is honoured as a patron of those drawn to the contemplative life; he is invoked by the people of Calabria, where he passed his last years.