06 October 2008

St. Bruno

Confessor (III Class)
St. Bruno, born at Cologne, retired with six of his friends to one of the desert mountains of Dauphiny in the southeast of France. There he established the first house of the Order of the Carthusians. He died on October 6, 1101.

The picture below of St. Bruno is from the ceiling of our formerly-Carthusian Church. It is the particular honor of his order never to have been reformed. As Pope Innocent XI said of them, Cartusia numquam reformata, quia numquam deformata (the Carthusian [order] has never been reformed, for it has never been deformed). It is a general consensus that the Carthusian Order, from its inception even until now, is the strictest religious order in the Church. The name, by the way, derives from the Chartreuse Mountains in the French Alps wherein Bruno built his first hermitage.


On a related note, I'm informed by the Bad Catholics' Guide to Wine, Whiskey, and Song that the liqueur Chartreuse is an excellent digestif which "gets its pale green color from 130 local herbs and flowers collected by the monks and distilled behind the stone walls of the cloister" (p. 23).

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