Suggest an Edit — Anthelm

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Biography

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Anthelm, also known as Anthelme or Antelmus of Belley, was a twelfth-century Carthusian monk and bishop. He was born in 1107 at the castle of Chignin in Savoy, of a noble family. After ordination as a priest in the secular clergy he was drawn to the Carthusian life and entered the charterhouse of Portes in Bugey in the later 1130s. In 1139 the community of the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the order, elected him prior.

As prior of the Grande Chartreuse for about twelve years he helped consolidate the still-young Carthusian Order. He obtained papal confirmation of the Consuetudines compiled under Prior Guigo I and insisted on the solitude and austerity that marked Carthusian observance while the order continued to spread. About 1151 he resigned the priorate and returned to a more hidden monastic life, later serving as prior of Portes. In the schism that followed the death of Pope Adrian IV he supported Pope Alexander III against the imperial antipope Victor IV.

In 1163 the church of Belley elected him bishop. He accepted the see only under pressure from Alexander III. As bishop he kept much of his monastic severity, cared for the poor, and worked to reform the clergy of the diocese. He came into conflict with Count Humbert III of Savoy over ecclesiastical rights and at one point excommunicated the count. He also sided with Thomas Becket in the archbishop's struggle with the English crown. He remained bishop of Belley until his death.

Anthelm died on 26 June 1178 and was buried in the cathedral of Belley. A local cult developed thereafter, and the Carthusians have long venerated him as a saint. His feast is kept on 26 June. He was not the subject of a solemn papal canonization of the later medieval type; recognition of his sanctity rests on longstanding veneration in his diocese and order.

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