Olegarius

Olegarius (also known as Oleguer, Olegario, or Oldegar; Catalan: Oleguer Bonestruga) was a Catalan churchman of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, born in Barcelona in 1060 into a family of the urban notability of the County of Barcelona. He received his formation among the clergy of his native city and entered the cathedral chapter of Barcelona as a canon. Drawn to the reformed common life then spreading among cathedral and collegiate clergy, he was associated with the community of canons at Sant Adrià de Besòs and later joined the influential congregation of Canons Regular of Saint-Ruf near Avignon, a leading house of the Augustinian canons in southern France and a centre of Gregorian reform. In the first decade of the twelfth century he rose to be abbot of Saint-Ruf, from which position he became known beyond Catalonia as a reformer and administrator.

In 1116 he was elected bishop of Barcelona. Two years later, after Count Ramon Berenguer III of Barcelona had recovered the long-abandoned city of Tarragona from Muslim rule, Pope Gelasius II restored the ancient metropolitan see and named Olegarius its archbishop. He thereafter held Tarragona together with Barcelona, a dual charge that placed him at the centre of the ecclesiastical reconstruction of the Catalan frontier. Tarragona had been a metropolitan church in late antiquity and the Visigothic period, but its hierarchy had collapsed after the eighth-century Islamic conquest; Olegarius’s task was to re-establish cathedral life, recover rights and property, attract settlers and clergy to a still-insecure district, and assert Tarragona’s metropolitan jurisdiction over the suffragan dioceses of the old province. He obtained papal confirmation of those rights, notably in the time of Pope Callixtus II, and worked in close concert with the counts of Barcelona to give the restored church a stable territorial and legal foundation.

Olegarius was a participant in the wider Latin church of his day. He attended the First Lateran Council in 1123, the council that ratified the Concordat of Worms and issued reforming canons on clerical life and the peace of the Church. He travelled more than once to the papal court and supported the programme of the Gregorian reform in Catalonia: the enforcement of clerical celibacy, the freedom of the Church from lay domination, and the moral discipline of clergy and laity. On the military frontier he framed the recovery of Tarragona and related campaigns in crusading language, encouraging Christian settlement and the defence of the new ecclesiastical province. His episcopate thus joined pastoral government, papal diplomacy, and the politics of the Reconquista at a moment when the County of Barcelona was expanding southward and knitting its church more tightly to Rome.

He died in Barcelona on 6 March 1137 and was buried in the cathedral of that city, later the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, where his tomb became a focus of local veneration. A medieval Life circulated after his death, and his cult took root in Barcelona and Tarragona. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 6 March. He is honoured as a saint and is invoked as a patron of Barcelona. Formal papal canonization in the later juridical sense is not clearly documented in the surviving record; his recognition rests on longstanding liturgical cult and later confirmation of that cult rather than on a fully recorded canonization process.