Suggest an Edit — Confessor Bernard of Menthon

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Biography

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Bernard of Menthon, known also as Bernard of Montjoux and sometimes as Bernard of Aosta, was a priest and archdeacon of the western Alps whose name became attached to two of the principal passes between Italy and northern Europe. He was born at the castle of Menthon on the eastern shore of Lake Annecy in Savoy, into a family of local nobility. Precise dates for his life are not established by contemporary documents. An older hagiographical tradition, followed by some early modern martyrologies, assigned him to the tenth century, with a birth around 923 and a death at Novara in 1008. Most modern historians, working from the documentary context of the diocese of Aosta and of the Alpine hospices, place his career in the eleventh century and commonly give his death as 1081. The medieval life relates that his parents intended him for marriage and a secular career, but that he left home, received clerical formation, and was ordained. He is then found in the Val d'Aosta, where he held the office of archdeacon, with responsibility for clerical discipline and for pastoral care in a mountainous diocese.

The Pennine Alps presented grave obstacles to pilgrims, merchants, and local inhabitants. The pass of Mons Jovis, or Mont-Joux, later renamed the Great Saint Bernard Pass, rises to nearly 2,500 metres; a second route, the Little Saint Bernard Pass, lies to the southwest. Roman mansiones had once stood on these roads, and there are traces of earlier Christian shelters, but by Bernard's time travelers were poorly provided for and were exposed to snow, fog, avalanche, and robbery. As archdeacon he established, or re-established, a hospice at the summit of the Great Saint Bernard Pass and another at the Little Saint Bernard Pass, offering food, lodging, and burial for those who died on the road. He organized communities of canons to serve the houses; those communities came to follow the Rule of Saint Augustine and are counted among the Canons Regular. The hospice on the Great Saint Bernard Pass endured as one of the best-known charitable foundations of the medieval Alps. In the early modern period the canons there bred the large rescue dogs later called Saint Bernards, a development that lies centuries after Bernard's own lifetime.

Bernard is described as having preached in the valleys, sought the reform of local clergy, and administered both the archdeaconry and the new hospices over many years. He died at Novara in Piedmont, a city then linked by road and by ecclesiastical ties to the Val d'Aosta; the exact circumstances of his presence there are not recorded in detail. He was buried at Novara, and a local cult formed around his tomb. Pope Innocent XI confirmed that cult and inscribed him among the saints in 1681. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 28 May; some older calendars used 15 June. He is honoured as patron of mountaineers, skiers, alpinists, travelers in the Alps, and the inhabitants of the Alpine regions. The two passes and the hospices still bear his name, and his relics have been preserved at Novara.

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