Peter of Tarentaise

Peter of Tarentaise, also called Peter II of Tarentaise, was born in 1102 at Saint-Maurice-l'Exil in the Dauphiné, in what is now southeastern France. Traditional accounts describe a family of modest condition whose members later followed him into religion: his father and brothers entered Cistercian houses and his mother and sister entered convents. At about the age of twenty he joined the Cistercian abbey of Bonnevaux, a daughter-house of Cîteaux in the same region. There he was trained in the reformed observance of the White Monks and acquired a reputation for austerity, charity, and practical capacity.

In 1132 he was sent as first abbot to the new Cistercian foundation of Tamié in the mountains of Savoy. A decade later, in 1142, he was elected archbishop of Tarentaise, whose cathedral seat was at Moûtiers in the Tarentaise valley. He accepted only under obedience and with reluctance. As bishop he sought to recover alienated church property, restore clerical discipline, and relieve the poor of an Alpine diocese often afflicted by scarcity. He is especially associated with a regular distribution of food to the needy that continued in the region for centuries, and with the restoration of a hospice for travellers on the Little Saint Bernard Pass, a hazardous route between Savoy and the Val d'Aosta.

Drawn back to the cloister, he at one point left his see in secret and lived for about a year as an unknown monk in a distant Cistercian monastery before he was identified and compelled by higher authority to resume his pastoral charge. During the papal schism that followed the election of Alexander III he supported the recognized pope against the imperial antipope and against the ecclesiastical policy of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. His standing as a Cistercian bishop of known integrity also led secular rulers to use him as a mediator.

In 1174, while travelling on a mission of peace between King Louis VII of France and King Henry II of England, he fell ill and died on 14 September at the Cistercian abbey of Bellevaux in Burgundy (now in the Haute-Saône). He was buried at that abbey. Pope Celestine III canonized him in 1191. His feast is kept on 8 May. He should not be confused with the later Dominican Pierre de Tarentaise who became Pope Innocent V in the thirteenth century. The twelfth-century archbishop is remembered as a type of the reluctant Cistercian prelate: severe in personal life, active in works of mercy, and unwilling to cling to office.