St. Bruno

On October 6 the Church honors Bruno of Cologne (c. 1030-1101), the founder of the Carthusian Order — the most austere contemplative order the Latin Church has ever known. Born in Cologne around 1030, Bruno studied and taught theology at Reims, where for nearly twenty years he headed the episcopal school and counted among his pupils the future Pope Urban II. In 1075 he was appointed chancellor of the Archdiocese of Reims; the violent Manasses de Gournai, who had succeeded to the see, made the office a trial, and Bruno's part in the bishop's eventual deposition in 1080 marked his last public act before he withdrew from the world.

In 1084 Bruno and six companions went to Hugh of Châteauneuf, Bishop of Grenoble, and asked for a place of solitude. Hugh installed them in a wild, uninhabited valley of the Alps of the Dauphiné — a place called Chartreuse, not far from Grenoble. There they built an oratory and individual cells, living in poverty, silence, and solitude — the first Carthusian community, the mother house of an order that would never reform its rule because it had never needed to. The Grande Chartreuse stands in that valley, the head of every Carthusian house in the world.

Bruno's years at Reims left him with a devotion to St. Remigius, the sixth-century bishop who had baptized Clovis in that city — a devotion attested by a surviving letter from his Calabrian years to his old friend Raoul le Verd, provost of the cathedral chapter of Reims, in which Bruno asks him to send a copy of the Life of St. Remi, "because it is impossible to find a copy where we are." As a young student at Reims in October 1049 he had witnessed Pope Leo IX translate Remigius's relics and consecrate the abbey church — events that fixed the saint's memory in his mind for life.

In 1090 Bruno's former pupil, now Pope Urban II, called him to Rome as an advisor. Bruno lived in the Lateran with the pope, present at the Council of Benevento in 1091, but he refused the Archbishopric of Reggio Calabria that Urban pressed on him. Instead, in 1091, he withdrew again to a forested high valley in the Diocese of Squillace, in Calabria, where Count Roger I of Sicily granted him the land. There, at Serra San Bruno, he built a second hermitage — the Certosa di Serra San Bruno, the motherhouse of the Carthusians in Italy. He died there on October 6, 1101, and was buried in the cemetery of the hermitage of Santa Maria.

Bruno was never formally canonized — the Carthusian Order's strict observance of humility kept him from the process. His cult was authorized for the Carthusian Order by Leo X in 1514, and Gregory XV extended it to the whole Church on February 17, 1623, inserting him in the General Roman Calendar for October 6. His relics, rediscovered in 1513 with the epitaph Haec sunt ossa magistri Brunonis — "these are the bones of the master Bruno" — are venerated at the Certosa of Serra San Bruno, the chief pilgrimage site of the saint and the order he founded. The Carthusian Statutes, faithful to his inspiration, proclaim the Mother of God the first and chief patron of every house of the order. Bruno is the patron saint of Calabria and one of the patron saints of Germany.