Amadeus of Lausanne

Amadeus of Lausanne was a twelfth-century Cistercian monk, abbot of Hautecombe, and bishop of Lausanne, later venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. He was born about 1110 at the castle of Chatte in the Dauphiné, in the western Alps, a territory then attached to the Kingdom of Burgundy within the Holy Roman Empire and today in the French department of Isère. His father, Amadeus of Clermont, lord of Hauterive, belonged to the local aristocracy and in later life took the Cistercian habit at the abbey of Bonnevaux; his mother likewise came from a noble family of the region. The boy was first educated among the monks of Bonnevaux and then spent time at the Benedictine abbey of Cluny, then at the height of its influence. While still in his teens he entered the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux in Champagne, where Bernard of Clairvaux was abbot, and there he was trained in the observances, theology, and pastoral outlook of the early Cistercian reform.

After a number of years in the community of Clairvaux, Amadeus was sent to Savoy to govern the Cistercian abbey of Hautecombe, on the shores of Lake Bourget. Conventional dates place his abbacy in the late 1130s and early 1140s. Hautecombe was a relatively recent foundation, and his task was to establish regular discipline and to represent Cistercian life in a princely landscape dominated by the counts of Savoy. In 1144 or 1145 the canons of Lausanne elected him bishop. He is said to have accepted the office only with reluctance and under the insistence of Bernard and of the Holy See. Consecrated to a diocese that stretched across much of what is now western Switzerland and adjoining lands, he inherited a church in need of reform and a temporal position entangled with the rights of local lords and of the empire.

As bishop, Amadeus worked to restore clerical discipline, to recover alienated ecclesiastical property, and to uphold the rights of his see. His episcopate was turbulent. Opposition from powerful laymen forced him at least once into exile from Lausanne, during which he took shelter in monastic houses of the region. He remained closely tied to Cistercian networks and to the court of Savoy; tradition and later historiography present him as tutor and adviser to Humbert III, count of Savoy. He lived through the preaching of the Second Crusade, the pontificate of the Cistercian pope Eugene III, and the early years of Frederick Barbarossa, and he necessarily took part in the ecclesiastical politics of the kingdom of Burgundy. Despite these burdens he maintained a reputation for personal austerity and for devotion to the Virgin Mary.

Amadeus’s principal surviving works are eight homilies on the Blessed Virgin Mary. Composed in a Latin style formed by Scripture, the liturgy, and Cistercian preaching, they dwell on Mary’s privileges, her role in the incarnation, and her significance for the life of the church. The homilies circulated in manuscript in the later Middle Ages and are the chief basis for his standing as a spiritual writer. He died on 27 August 1159, most accounts placing the death at Lausanne, and he was buried in the cathedral there. A cult developed at his tomb. He is inscribed in later martyrologies and Cistercian calendars as a saint; his feast is commonly observed on 28 August, though some traditions keep 27 August, the reported day of his death. He was not the object of a formal papal canonization of the type that became standard in later centuries. His memory has remained strongest in the diocese of Lausanne and in Cistercian liturgical books; no extensive list of special patronages is attached to his name in the usual directories of saints.