Blessed Gerard of Clairvaux

Blessed Gerard of Clairvaux was a Cistercian monk, abbot, and martyr of the twelfth century. He is not to be confused with Saint Gerard of Clairvaux, who died in 1138 and was the elder brother and cellarer of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Almost nothing is known of this later Gerard’s parentage, birthplace, or year of birth; the surviving notices begin with his monastic life. He entered the abbey of Clairvaux in the county of Champagne while Saint Bernard was still abbot (Bernard had founded Clairvaux in 1115 and remained its abbot until his death in 1153). There Gerard was formed in the early Cistercian observance that Bernard had made famous throughout Latin Europe.

From Clairvaux he was sent to Italy and became abbot of Fossanova (also called Fossa Nova), a Cistercian house in the Papal States, in the region of present-day Lazio. Fossanova belonged to the filiation of Clairvaux. The exact year of his appointment is not firmly established in the sources, but he governed that Italian community before being recalled to France. In 1170 he was elected sixth abbot of Clairvaux, following Bernard and the intervening abbots Robert of Bruges, Fastred of Cambron, Geoffrey of Auxerre, and Pons of Polignac. As father-abbot of Clairvaux he was responsible for the spiritual oversight and canonical visitation of a large family of daughter monasteries.

In 1177 Gerard undertook a visitation of the abbey of Igny (Notre-Dame d’Igny), a daughter house of Clairvaux in the diocese of Reims, in Champagne. According to Cistercian tradition, he found a monk of Igny living in a manner contrary to the Rule and attempted to correct him. The monk attacked Gerard and killed him. The Order regarded the death as martyrdom suffered in the discharge of an abbot’s duty to maintain discipline. The year 1177 is consistently given for the event; later writers locate it at Igny. Details of the burial are not clearly recorded in the accounts that survive.

Gerard was honoured as a blessed martyr in Cistercian calendars and menologies. His cult was monastic rather than universal, and there is no well-attested record of a formal papal canonization or of a named pope confirming the cult in the later juridical sense. He is commonly commemorated on 30 January. Because the documentary base is thin, many aspects of his biography—including his origins, the length of his Italian abbacy, and the precise circumstances of his burial—remain unknown; what can be stated with confidence is his place in the succession of Clairvaux, his death by violence in 1177 in the course of a visitation, and his subsequent veneration within the Cistercian Order.