Feast day: April 17

St. Stephen Harding

Abbot · d. 1134

Patron of —

An English monk and co-founder of the Cistercian reform whose 'Charter of Charity' gave the new order its constitution, and who welcomed the young Bernard of Clairvaux.

Stephen Harding was an Englishman, born in Dorset about the middle of the eleventh century and educated as a boy at Sherborne Abbey. As a young man he travelled — to Scotland, then to Paris and Rome — before joining a community of monks at Molesme in Burgundy who longed for a stricter observance of the Rule of St. Benedict.

In 1098 he was among the band of about twenty-one monks who left Molesme to found a new monastery in the marshes of Cîteaux, seeking a life of poverty, manual labour, and exact fidelity to the Rule. This was the birth of the Cistercian Order, and Stephen, who became its third abbot in 1109, is regarded as its true organizer.

His great achievement was the 'Charter of Charity,' the constitution that bound the daughter-houses of Cîteaux into a single order governed by annual general chapters and mutual visitation — a model of religious government that influenced the whole later Church. He also reformed the abbey's liturgy and the text of its Bible.

The order nearly died out for lack of recruits until, in 1112, a young nobleman named Bernard arrived with thirty companions — the future St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Under Stephen's rule the Cistercians spread explosively across Europe. He resigned, old and blind, shortly before his death in 1134.

His simple constitution for the struggling new monastery of Cîteaux became the blueprint that spread the Cistercians across all of Europe.

Image: Doncsecz (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/14290d.htm