Saint Bruno

Priest, Founder of the Carthusians

Feast Day

October 6

Life

1030–1101

Canonized

1623

Order

Order of the Carthusians

Born

Cologne

Bruno of Cologne was born about 1030 of a noble family. He studied at the cathedral school of Reims under Hereman of Tournai, and from about 1056 served as a master and then as chancellor at Reims for nearly twenty years, forming a generation of clergy that included Pope Blessed Urban II, his future patron.

Conflict with the simoniac archbishop Manasses, whose deposition Bruno helped effect at the Council of Autun in 1077, drove him to seek the eremitic life. After a brief experiment under Saint Robert of Molesme, in 1084 Bruno and six companions were given by Saint Hugh, bishop of Grenoble, the high alpine wilderness of the Chartreuse, where they built wooden cells around an oratory. From this site, La Grande Chartreuse, the Carthusian Order takes its name.

In 1090 Pope Urban II summoned Bruno to Rome to assist him in the affairs of the Church, but the city's noise distressed his contemplative spirit, and the Pope released him to found a second hermitage at La Torre in Calabria. He died there on 6 October 1101. His cultus was confirmed in 1514, and Pope Gregory XV by an equipollent canonization extended his feast to the universal Church in 1623. The Carthusians, never reformed because never deformed, as the saying has it, observe his Memorial as their founder.