Saint Norbert of Xanten, Bishop and Confessor
Founder of the Order of Prémontré, Archbishop of Magdeburg, Apostle of the Blessed Sacrament
Feast: 6 June — Double (1962 Missale Romanum)
I. Identity and Origins
Norbert was born at Xanten on the left bank of the Rhine, near Wesel, in the Archbishopric of Cologne, about the year 1080. He came of the high nobility of the Empire: his father, Heribert, Count of Gennep, was connected to the imperial house and to the House of Lorraine. From his earliest years Norbert was destined for the clerical estate after the manner common to noble sons of that age, and through the favor of his family he was received as a canon of the collegiate church of Saint Victor at Xanten, having been ordained to the subdiaconate.
It is no part of true hagiography to gild what the sources themselves do not gild. The earliest vitae are candid that the young Norbert at first wore his canonry lightly. Holding a benefice whose obligation was the chanting of the Divine Office, he is said to have arranged for another to discharge the choral duty in his stead, and he passed into the service of the courts — first of Frederick, Prince-Bishop of Cologne, and afterward of the Emperor Henry V, becoming the imperial almoner. He moved amid the splendor of princes; the bishopric of Cambrai was offered him and he declined it, preferring the comfort of his station to its burdens. Erat enim adhuc in vita saeculari — he was as yet in the worldly life. The greatness of the saint is measured precisely against this beginning.
Editorial note: The c. 1080 birth-date is the reading of the Catholic Encyclopedia and the early vitae; certain sources give c. 1075. The detail of the hired substitute in choir derives from the early biographical tradition (Vita A; the Vita attributed to Hugh of Fosses), preserved in MGH SS 12 and PL 170, and is reported here as that tradition presents it.
II. Conversion and Manner of Life
The turn of his life came, as it came to Saul on the Damascus road and to so many of the saints, by a sudden visitation. About the year 1115, as Norbert rode out from Vreden toward Xanten, a violent storm overtook him; a bolt of lightning struck near, casting horse and rider to the earth, and Norbert lay for nearly an hour as one dead. Rising, he heard within himself the summons of the Psalmist: Diverte a malo, et fac bonum — “Turn away from evil, and do good” (Ps. xxxvi. 27, Douay). From that hour the courtier became a penitent.
He withdrew to Siegburg and then to the hermitage of Fürstenberg, and there for some three years (c. 1115–1118) he gave himself to penance, prayer, and the study of the Scriptures and the Fathers. He received the priesthood, and — a thing significant for the whole of his after-life — he did not, as was then common among newly ordained noblemen, proceed to the altar in festal pomp, but vested in penitential garb and offered the Holy Sacrifice with tears. He attempted the reform of his brother canons at Xanten, and, meeting their resistance, he was summoned before the Synod of Fritzlar in 1118 to answer for his unlicensed preaching and his reproof of clerical laxity.
Norbert’s answer was characteristic of the man he had become. He resigned his benefices, sold his estates, gave the price to the poor, went barefoot to Pope Gelasius II at Saint-Gilles in Languedoc, and obtained from him a universal commission to preach. Thenceforward he was a wandering apostle, traversing the dioceses of France and the Empire in poverty, preaching penance, reconciling enemies, and recalling clergy and laity alike to the seriousness of the Gospel.
III. Ecclesial Role and Apostolate
The Order of Prémontré
In the valley of Prémontré, in the diocese of Laon, Norbert was led — by a vision, the tradition holds, in which the site was praemonstratum, “foreshown,” whence the name of his order — to establish on Christmas Day of the year 1120 a community of canons. He did not found a new monastic family of the eremitical kind, but a body of canons regular living under the Rule of Saint Augustine, joining the contemplative discipline of the cloister to the active labor of the sacred ministry: the solemn celebration of the Divine Office and the Holy Sacrifice, preaching, and the care of souls. This is the genius of the Premonstratensian — or Norbertine — vocation: ut sint contemplata aliis tradere, that what is drawn from contemplation may be handed on to others, the very principle the Angelic Doctor would afterward name the highest form of the active-contemplative life (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 188, a. 6).
The order spread with great rapidity through Germany, France, the Low Countries, and beyond, and embraced houses of women as well as men. Norbert numbered among his fruits the conversion of Blessed Hugh of Fosses, his first disciple and the true organizer of the order’s institutions, and the friendship of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, with whom he stood in the great causes of the age.
Defender of the Blessed Sacrament
Against the heresiarch Tanchelm, who in the region of Antwerp had blasphemed the Holy Eucharist, denied the efficacy of the Sacraments, and drawn multitudes after him, Norbert preached with such force that the people were reclaimed to the faith and to devout reception of the Body of the Lord. From this apostolate flows the abiding character of his cultus: Norbert is venerated as the Apostle of the Blessed Sacrament, and in later art he is figured bearing the monstrance — a Baroque attribute, to be sure, yet faithful to the substance of his life’s work, which was reparation for irreverence offered to the Sacrament of the Altar.
Archbishop of Magdeburg
In 1126, against his own will, Norbert was raised to the archiepiscopal see of Magdeburg. He entered his cathedral city so poorly clad that the porter, mistaking him for a beggar, would have turned him away. As archbishop he labored to reform a worldly and resentful clergy, to recover the alienated patrimony of the Church, and to enforce the discipline of celibacy and the canonical life — and he suffered for it, more than once escaping attempts upon his life. He stood firmly with Pope Innocent II against the antipope Anacletus II during the schism of 1130, and accompanied the Emperor Lothair to Rome in support of the lawful pontiff.
IV. Death and Veneration
Worn by his labors and by the fatigue of the Roman journey, Norbert fell ill upon his return and died at Magdeburg on the 6th of June, 1134, in about his fifty-fourth year. He was buried on the 11th of June in the Premonstratensian church of Saint Mary at Magdeburg. So contested was the possession of his body that the canons of the cathedral and those of his own abbey both laid claim to it, and the matter was settled by the decree of the Emperor Lothair in favor of the Norbertine abbey.
When Magdeburg passed to the Protestants in the following century, the abbey of Strahov near Prague sought repeatedly to recover the relics; on the 2nd of May, 1627, the body was at last translated to Strahov, where it remains. The chronicles record that on the occasion of the translation many Protestants were reconciled to the Catholic Church, and the saint was proclaimed Patron and Protector of Bohemia.
Pope Gregory XIII confirmed the liturgical cultus in 1582 (the bull Immensae divinae sapientiae altitudo, 28 July 1582); Pope Clement X extended the feast to the universal Church in 1672. In the traditional Roman calendar his feast is kept on the 6th of June as a Double. He is invoked as patron of Bohemia, of peace and reconciliation, and — by a later devotional tradition — of safe childbirth.
V. Spiritual Lessons
That conversion is real, and possible, and never too late for the one who consents to grace. Norbert was no precocious saint; he was a comfortable courtier holding a benefice he scarcely served. Yet a single hour upon the ground sufficed, because he consented. The lightning was the occasion; the grace, and his free assent to it, were the cause. The faithful soul need not wait for thunder: the same call is in every examination of conscience honestly made.
That the reform of the Church begins in the reform of self. Norbert reproved clerical laxity, but only after he had first stripped himself of estates, comfort, and station. He preached penance barefoot. He came to his cathedral city looking like the beggar he had chosen to become. The reformer who has not first reformed himself is a noise; Norbert was a witness.
That reverence for the Most Holy Sacrament is the measure of a Catholic life. The whole arc of his apostolate — against Tanchelm, in the parishes, at the altar where he wept — was reparation for irreverence offered to the Eucharistic Lord. It is a fitting providence that his feast falls within the season of Corpus Christi, when the Church bids us repair by adoration the outrages the Sacrament suffers still.
VI. Oratio
Composed in the manner of the received collects; this prayer is not taken from the Missale Romanum*. The proper Collect of the day is appended below in §VII.*
Deus, qui beátum Norbértum Confessórem tuum atque Pontíficem ex aulæ regiæ delíciis ad pæniténtiæ et apostólici labóris arduitátem mirabíliter vocásti: concéde propítius; ut, qui Sacraménti Altáris reveréntiam ipso docénte venerámur, eius intercessióne ad supérnæ patriæ gáudia perveníre mereámur. Per Dóminum.
O God, who didst wondrously call blessed Norbert, Thy Confessor and Bishop, from the delights of the royal court to the hard road of penance and apostolic toil: mercifully grant that we who, taught by him, venerate the Sacrament of the Altar with due reverence, may by his intercession deserve to attain the joys of our heavenly fatherland. Through our Lord.
VII. The Proper Collect (1962 Missale Romanum)
Deus, qui beátum Norbértum Confessórem tuum atque Pontíficem verbi tui præcónem éffícere, et per eum Ecclésiam tuam nova prole fœcundáre dignátus es: da, quǽsumus; ut, eius suffragántibus méritis, quod ore simul et ópere dócuit, te adiuvánte, exercére valeámus. Per Dóminum.
O God, who didst vouchsafe to make blessed Norbert, Thy Confessor and Bishop, a herald of Thy word, and through him to enrich Thy Church with a new offspring: grant, we beseech Thee; that, his merits aiding us, we may avail by Thy help to practise what he taught by both word and deed. Through our Lord.
Editorial note: The Latin of the proper Collect should be verified against a printed 1962 Missale or the Liber Usualis before publication; it is given here from the received tradition of the feast and is reproduced from memory of that text rather than from a critical collation.
Further Study
- Lives of the Saints — companion hagiographies of the great reforming founders of the twelfth century: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bruno, Saint Stephen Harding.
- Church History — Crisis and continuity: the Investiture Controversy, the schism of Anacletus, and the Gregorian reform of clergy and canonical life, the very world in which Norbert labored.
- Sacred Liturgy — the canonical life and the Divine Office: how the Premonstratensian charism unites choir and apostolate; and the theology of Eucharistic reparation, fittingly studied in the Corpus Christi season.
- Theology and Doctrine — Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 188, a. 6, on the superiority of the mixed life that hands on to others the fruits of contemplation — the scholastic articulation of the Norbertine vocation.
Sancte Norbérte, ora pro nobis.