Feast day: June 7
St. Robert of Newminster
An English priest who joined the strict new Cistercian reform and became the gentle, austere founding abbot of Newminster Abbey in Northumberland.
Robert was an English priest of the twelfth century, born in Yorkshire and educated at Paris, who became a Benedictine monk at Whitby. But he was drawn to the stricter, more austere life of the new Cistercian reform then sweeping Europe, and joined the band of monks who, in a famous secession, left a comfortable abbey to found Fountains Abbey in the Yorkshire dales, embracing real poverty.
About 1138 he was chosen to lead a small colony of monks sent out from Fountains to make a new foundation, and became the first abbot of Newminster, in Northumberland. Under his rule the house flourished and itself sent out further colonies to found daughter monasteries.
Robert was famous for his gentleness, his austerity, and his life of prayer. He was a friend of the hermit St. Godric of Finchale and, tradition says, of St. Bernard of Clairvaux himself; when his own monks once brought an accusation against him, he travelled to Bernard to clear his name, and the two became close.
He governed Newminster until his death in 1159. His tomb became a place of pilgrimage, and he is honoured as one of the holy founders of English Cistercian monasticism.
Known for his mildness and his nights of prayer, he founded three more monasteries from his own, spreading the reform across northern England.
Image: BSonne (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/13098a.htm
Get a story like this every Sunday.