Feast day: August 20
St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Magnetic young noble who entered a failing monastery with 30 friends and relatives he'd recruited — then dominated 12th-century Europe as adviser to popes and kings.
Bernard was born in 1090 to a noble family of Burgundy and grew up gifted, eloquent, and charming, with every door of the world open to him. At about twenty-two he turned his back on it all to enter the strict, struggling new monastery of Cîteaux, the cradle of the Cistercian reform — and so persuasive was he that he brought with him some thirty companions, including his own brothers and uncle, sweeping a whole circle of young noblemen into the cloister.
Three years later he was sent, still only twenty-five, to found a new monastery in a remote valley he named Clairvaux. Under his fervent leadership it became the most famous abbey in Europe and the heart of an astonishing expansion; by his death the Cistercian order, largely through him, numbered hundreds of monasteries across the Continent. He shaped the spirituality of his age more than any other man.
For all his love of the hidden monastic life, he was constantly drawn out of it onto the world stage. He healed a disputed papal election, preached the Second Crusade at the pope's command, confronted the brilliant philosopher Abelard, advised popes and kings, and was sought everywhere as a peacemaker and a conscience — the uncrowned moral authority of Christendom.
His preaching and writing earned him the name 'the mellifluous Doctor' — honey-sweet — and his sermons on the love of God and his tender devotion to the Virgin Mary and the name of Jesus nourished the Church for centuries. He died at Clairvaux in 1153, was canonized in 1174, and was declared a Doctor of the Church — the last of the Fathers, as he is sometimes called.
He was so persuasive that mothers reportedly hid their sons when he came recruiting. He arrived at the monastery with 30 converts, including his own brothers.
“You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.”
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Image: artist unknown (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/02498d.htm
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