Feast day: March 28

St. Guntram

King · c. 532–592

Patron of —

A Frankish king of Burgundy, violent and divorced in his youth, who turned to penance and became a peacemaker, lawgiver, and protector of the poor and the Church.

Guntram was a king of the Franks in the sixth century, one of the grandsons of Clovis, who in the division of the Merovingian realm received the kingdom of Burgundy and Orléans in 561. He ruled in a brutal age of family murder and civil war among the Frankish kings, and his own early life was not free of its violence — he repudiated wives and, in a fit of anger, once had a physician put to death.

Yet, as the chronicler St. Gregory of Tours portrays him, Guntram grew into something rare among the Merovingians: a genuinely just and merciful ruler who came to be called 'the good king.' He worked for peace among his warring kinsmen, acting as protector and arbiter for his nephews' kingdoms.

He was a generous patron of the Church, founding and endowing monasteries and churches, strict in fasting and prayer, and known for his care of the poor and the sick, especially during plague and famine. He submitted readily to the counsel of bishops and did public penance for the sins of his earlier years.

He died in 592 and was venerated as a saint almost at once — an unusual honour for a king of that turbulent dynasty, and a sign of how his later reputation for justice and charity had eclipsed the failings of his youth.

Gregory of Tours called him more like a good bishop than a king — a Merovingian monarch who did public penance and emptied his treasury for famine relief.

Image: Atelier de Chalon-sur-Saône (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/03068a.htm