Confessor Bruno

Saint Bruno, known as Bruno of Cologne and commemorated in the Latin calendar as a confessor, was born at Cologne in the early eleventh century. He was educated first in his native city and then at the cathedral school of Rheims, one of the leading schools of western Europe in that age. After a period as a canon in Cologne he was recalled to Rheims, where he taught theology and the liberal arts and acquired a wide reputation as a master. He later served as chancellor of the Archdiocese of Rheims, which placed him at the centre of the administration of one of the principal sees of the West Frankish kingdom. The exact year of his birth is not recorded in contemporary sources and is known only approximately from later tradition.

In the later eleventh century Bruno took part in the movement of ecclesiastical reform associated with the papacy of Gregory VII. He opposed Archbishop Manasses I of Rheims, whose tenure was widely condemned as simoniacal, and was among those who pressed for the archbishop’s deposition. After Manasses was removed, Bruno was spoken of for the see of Rheims itself but did not accept it. Seeking a stricter and more hidden life, he left the schools and the cathedral. After a period of discernment, which included contact with the circle of Robert of Molesme, he went to the diocese of Grenoble. Bishop Hugh of Grenoble granted Bruno and a small group of companions a remote site in the Chartreuse mountains.

There, in 1084, they established a hermitage that became the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian Order. The life they adopted joined eremitical solitude to a limited common discipline: each monk lived in a separate cell, coming together for the night office and conventual Mass, and observing silence, fasting, manual labour, and liturgical prayer. Bruno left no formal written rule; Carthusian customs were compiled later by his successors. The community remained small and withdrawn from public notice.

In 1090 Pope Urban II, who had studied under Bruno at Rheims, summoned him to Rome as an adviser. Bruno obeyed but refused the high offices urged upon him. With papal consent he withdrew again, this time to the highlands of Calabria in southern Italy, where Count Roger of Sicily granted him land in the diocese of Squillace. He founded a second hermitage, Santa Maria della Torre, and spent his last years there. Two letters written from Calabria, one to Raoul le Verd and another to the monks of Chartreuse, survive and express his attachment to solitude. He died on 6 October 1101 and was buried at the Calabrian hermitage. He was never the subject of a formal canonization process of the later medieval type. The Carthusians received permission from Pope Leo X in 1514 to keep his feast, and in 1623 Pope Gregory XV extended the observance to the universal Church. He is venerated as founder of the Carthusians and as a patron of Calabria; his relics are associated with the Charterhouse at Serra San Bruno, which grew from his second foundation.