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The saints

St. Bruno

A famous teacher who walked away to found the Carthusians in the mountains of the Chartreuse.

Feast: 6 October · about 1030 to 1101 · The Middle Ages · Cologne, Reims, the Chartreuse and Calabria

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Painting of St. Bruno in a white Carthusian habit, kneeling in a rocky wilderness and looking up.

Nicolas Mignard, 1638. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Home / The saints / St. Bruno

The Grande Chartreuse, French Alps, 1084

Bruno was a celebrated teacher at the cathedral school of Reims; one of his students became Pope Urban II.1

He clashed with a corrupt archbishop and left.1

With six companions he went into the mountains near Grenoble and began the Carthusians.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers him as the founder of the Carthusians.

01St. Bruno

Silence

Carthusians live alone in cells and gather for prayer, and the order has barely changed in nine centuries.1

His old student, now pope, called him to Rome, and Bruno later founded another hermitage in Calabria.1

Live it this week

Build a quiet corner

Carthusians each have a cell for prayer. Set up a small prayer corner at home this week (a chair, a cross, a Bible, a candle) and use it every day.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Bruno”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.