Hugh of Châteauneuf

Hugh of Châteauneuf, also known as Hugh of Grenoble, was born in 1053 at Châteauneuf-sur-Isère in the Dauphiné, near Valence in southeastern France. He was the son of a knight named Odilo of Châteauneuf. Raised for an ecclesiastical career, he became a canon of the cathedral of Valence while still a young man. In 1080 a council meeting at Avignon, acting in the spirit of the Gregorian reform, elected him bishop of Grenoble although he was not yet thirty and had not yet been ordained priest. Pope Gregory VII confirmed the election. Hugh accepted the office with reluctance, was ordained, and was consecrated.

He found the diocese of Grenoble in serious disorder. Simony was common, many clergy lived in concubinage, and lay magnates had seized church property. Hugh worked to restore discipline: he held synods, insisted on clerical celibacy and the canonical life, recovered alienated estates, and sought to free the Church from secular control. The burden of the see and the resistance he met led him more than once to ask the Holy See for leave to resign and enter a monastery. Successive popes, beginning with Gregory VII, refused and ordered him to remain at Grenoble.

In 1084 he gave lasting support to the monastic revival of his age by receiving Bruno of Cologne and a small group of companions who wished to live as hermits. Hugh granted them a remote alpine valley in the Chartreuse massif north of Grenoble, where they founded the Grande Chartreuse, mother house of the Carthusian Order. He remained the community’s protector and a frequent visitor for the rest of his life, while himself continuing as a diocesan bishop rather than becoming a monk. His episcopate lasted fifty-two years and spanned the height of the Investiture Controversy; he took part in reform councils and was regarded as a model bishop of the Gregorian era.

Contemporary accounts describe him as austere in personal life, given to fasting, vigils, and charity toward the poor. He died at Grenoble on 1 April 1132. In 1134 Pope Innocent II canonized him, only two years after his death, an unusually rapid recognition that reflected the reputation for holiness he already enjoyed. His feast is kept on 1 April. He is venerated as patron of Grenoble. His relics were enshrined in Grenoble Cathedral, though they later suffered during the French Revolution.