Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot and Doctor of the Church (Part One)


Text taken from The Saint Andrew Daily Missal.
Illustrations taken from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia,
unless otherwise stated.

20 August (Feast of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot and Doctor)
Double
White Vestments





Saint Bernard of Clairvaux 
(Abbot and Doctor of the Church) 
(1090 - 1153)

The Church is pleased to honour, during the Octave of the Assumption, Saint Bernard, the honey-mouthed Doctor (Doctor Mellifluus), whose principal title of glory is to have celebrated, with ineffable tenderness and ardent piety, in his prayers, his books and sermons, the varied greatness of Mary.

Born in 1091, of a noble Burgundian family, he succeeded, at the age of 22, in winning over to Christ thirty noblemen, who, with him, embraced monastic life at Citeaux. There, the Cistercian Order, a branch of the old Benedictine trunk, acquired a new vigour which enabled it to cover the whole of Europe with its shoots.

"The just", says the Offertory, "shall flourish like the palm-tree, he shall grow up like the cedar of Libanus."

And in the famous monastery which Bernard founded a short time afterwards, in the Vale of Clairvaux, on the Left Bank of the Aube, and whose first Abbot he became (Communion), he each day lavished on a community of seven hundred monks the treasures of doctrine and wisdom with which God endowed him and which make his name immortal (Introit, Epistle, Gradual).

An austere monk, a great Christian orator and a learned Doctor, he was the luminary, mentioned in the Gospel, which enlightened the world in the 12th-Century.


PART TWO FOLLOWS


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