Confessor Bruno

Saint Bruno, commonly called Bruno of Cologne and listed in older martyrologies as Confessor Bruno, was an eleventh-century priest, teacher, and monastic founder. He was born at Cologne in the Rhineland to a family of notable rank. After elementary studies in his native city he proceeded to the cathedral school of Reims, then among the foremost schools of northern Europe. There he studied under Heriman and in time succeeded as scholasticus, directing the school for many years and forming a large number of clergy, among them Odo of Châtillon, later Pope Urban II. Bruno was ordained priest and became a canon of Reims cathedral; he also served as chancellor of the archdiocese, a post that placed him at the center of church administration in one of the most important sees of the kingdom of France.

The later 1070s brought him into open conflict with Archbishop Manasses I of Reims, whose simoniacal appointment and violent conduct had provoked both local resistance and papal intervention. Bruno sided with the reform party. After Manasses was finally deposed, Bruno was put forward for the vacant archbishopric but refused it. Already resolved to abandon public office for a life of stricter poverty and prayer, he left Reims with a small group of companions. After a short period with an existing hermit community, the group placed itself under the direction of Hugh of Châteauneuf, bishop of Grenoble. In 1084 Bishop Hugh assigned them a desolate alpine valley in the massif of the Chartreuse. There Bruno and six companions, Landuin, Stephen of Bourg, Stephen of Die, Hugh the chaplain, and two laymen, Andrew and Guerin, began the form of life that would become the Carthusian Order: each monk occupying a separate cell, gathering only for the night office and conventual Mass, supporting themselves by copying books and by manual labor, and observing almost perpetual silence.

In 1090 Pope Urban II, who had been Bruno's pupil at Reims, called him to the papal court as an adviser. Bruno left the Grande Chartreuse with regret. At Rome he declined the pope's wish to make him archbishop of Reggio in Calabria. Allowed at last to return to solitude, he accepted land in the Calabrian highlands from Count Roger of Sicily and established a second hermitage, Santa Maria della Torre, in the wooded Serre mountains. From that house he continued to correspond with the community in the Alps, encouraging them to persevere in the customs he had given them. He never composed a written rule; the earliest Carthusian legislation, the Consuetudines of Prior Guigo I, was drawn up some years after Bruno's death on the basis of the practices he had instituted.

Bruno died at the Calabrian hermitage on 6 October 1101 and was buried in the monastery church. Because the Carthusians long refrained from promoting the cult of their members, he was never the subject of a formal process of canonization. In 1514 Pope Leo X granted the order permission to celebrate a liturgical feast in his honor; in 1623 Pope Gregory XV extended that feast to the whole Latin Church. His relics are still venerated at the charterhouse of Serra San Bruno in Calabria. He is honored as founder of the Carthusians and as a principal patron of that region.