October 6 - Saint Bruno

Quick Facts

• Educated in Paris and Rheims, France.
• Ordained c.1055.
• Taught theology; one of his students later became Blessed Pope Urban II.
• Presided over the cathedral school at Rheims from 1057 to 1075.
• Criticized the worldliness he saw in his fellow clergy.
• He opposed Manasses, Archbishop of Rheims, because of his laxity and mismanagement.Chancellor of the archdiocese of Rheims.
• Following a vision he received of a secluded hermitage where he could spend his life becoming closer to God, he retired to a mountain near Chartreuse in Dauphiny in 1084 and founded what became the first house of the Carthusian Order; he and his brothers supported themselves as manuscript copyists.
• Assistant to Pope Urban II in 1090, and supported his efforts at reform.
• Retiring from public life, he and his companions built a hermitage at Torre, where, 1095, the monastery of Saint Stephen was built.
• Bruno combined in the religious life the eremetical and the cenobitic; his learning is apparent from his scriptural commentaries.