Anthelm of Belley

Anthelm of Belley (also known as Anthelme or Anthelm of Chignin) was a twelfth-century Carthusian monk and bishop, born into a noble Savoyard family at Chignin, near Chambéry. Traditional accounts give his birth year as 1107. He entered the clerical state as a secular priest and is reported to have held a canonry connected with Geneva before abandoning that career for the eremitical life of the Carthusians. In the mid-1130s he entered the charterhouse of Portes in the Bugey, a house geographically close to the later scene of his episcopate, and from there he passed to the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the order in the mountains of the Dauphiné.

In 1139 he was elected prior of the Grande Chartreuse and became one of the principal organizers of the still-young Carthusian order after Bruno of Cologne and Guigo I. During his priorate he is credited with convening the first general chapter of the Carthusians, which bound the scattered charterhouses into a more coherent congregation, and with obtaining papal confirmation of the order’s customs. He acquired a reputation for austerity and for strict government of his monks. In the papal schism that followed the death of Adrian IV in 1159 he adhered to Pope Alexander III against the imperial antipope Victor IV and required the same allegiance within the order. After more than a decade as prior he resigned in order to live more obscurely, and he later served again as prior of Portes.

In 1163 the clergy and people of Belley chose him as bishop. He accepted the see only under papal insistence. As bishop he kept Carthusian habits of poverty and prayer while attempting to restore clerical discipline and to defend the rights of the Church and of the poor against local magnates. He came into conflict with Humbert III, Count of Savoy, and later tradition reports that he employed ecclesiastical censures in that dispute. Hagiographical sources ascribe miracles and gifts of counsel to him; such claims belong to the cult that formed after his death and cannot be independently verified from administrative records.

Anthelm died at Belley on 26 June 1178 and was buried in the cathedral there. A local cult arose promptly, and the Carthusian order also kept his memory. He is commemorated on 26 June. He was not the subject of a well-documented papal canonization of the later medieval or Tridentine type, and the precise circumstances of any later confirmation of his cult remain uncertain. He is remembered as a leading figure among the early Carthusians and as a reforming bishop of the medieval diocese of Belley.