S. Clodoaldi, Presbyteri et Confessoris — Roman Martyrology, 7 September
A Martyrology entry. Saint Cloud has no Mass in the 1962 Missale Romanum*; the seventh of September is a feria of the fourth class in the General Calendar, on which the Mass of the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost is repeated. He is named at Prime in the reading of the Martyrology, and in the dioceses of Paris and Versailles his feast is kept by proper right. His memory is kept here on the Martyrology’s authority.*
Elegi abiectus esse in domo Dei mei, magis quam habitare in tabernaculis peccatorum. “I have chosen to be an abject in the house of my God, rather than to dwell in the tabernacles of sinners.” — Psalm 83:11
I. Identitas et Origines
He was a king’s son who never reigned, and the Church has honoured him for fourteen centuries precisely for that.
Clodoald — the French have softened the name to Cloud, and a town on the Seine still bears it — was born about the year 522, the youngest of the three sons of Chlodomer, King of Orléans, who was himself the second son of Clovis and of Saint Clotilde. His mother was Guntheuc, a Burgundian princess. He was therefore, by blood, a grandson of the first Catholic king of the Franks and of the queen who had prayed him into the font at Rheims; and he was, by the ordinary expectation of his house, one of three boys among whom the kingdom of Orléans would one day be divided.
That expectation lasted two years. In 524 Chlodomer marched against the Burgundians, whose king Sigismund he had already murdered, and was killed at Vézeronce; the Burgundians cut off his head and set it on a lance. His three sons — Theodoald, Gunthar, and Clodoald, the eldest not yet ten — were taken into the keeping of their grandmother Clotilde, who had withdrawn to Paris after the death of Clovis and who now, for a second time, found herself raising the children of a dead king.
The primary witness for all of this is Gregory of Tours, writing within the lifetime of men who had known the principals, and his account of what followed (Historiae III, 18) is among the most terrible pages he wrote.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
Chlodomer’s kingdom had not lapsed; it was being held in trust, and the trustees were his brothers. Childebert, King of Paris, and Chlothar, King of Soissons, watched Clotilde’s affection for the three boys and drew the obvious conclusion: that she meant to see them crowned, and that when they were, the kingdom of Orléans would be lost to their uncles for good.
Gregory tells the rest with a plainness that needs no ornament. Childebert sent secretly to Chlothar, and the two kings summoned the children to Paris, on the pretence that they were to be raised to the throne. Clotilde, believing it, sent them. Then the uncles dispatched a messenger to the queen bearing a sword and a pair of shears, and put the question to her: should the boys live with their hair cut short, as clerics, or should they die? The long hair of the Merovingian kings was the sign of their royalty; to shear it was to unking them. Clotilde — Gregory says she was beside herself with grief and did not know what she was saying — answered that if they were not to reign she had rather see them dead than shorn. The messenger, it seems, did not wait for her to reconsider.
Chlothar took the eldest boy by the arm, threw him to the ground, and killed him with a knife. The second, Gunthar, seven years old, clung to Childebert’s knees and begged; Childebert, weeping, was moved to plead for his life; Chlothar threatened his brother with the same death, and Childebert let the child go, and the child was killed. The servants and tutors of the princes were slaughtered with them. Clotilde buried her grandsons in the basilica of the Holy Apostles — the church that would become Sainte-Geneviève — with as much royal ceremony as she could still command, and, Gregory says, was not seen to be consoled.
Clodoald, the third, was saved. Gregory says only that he was delivered auxilio virorum fortium — “by the help of brave men” — and that he then did a thing without precedent in his family: relicto regno terreno, ad Dominum transiit, et propriis manibus sibi capillos incidens, clericus factus est. He left the earthly kingdom, passed over to the Lord, cut his hair with his own hands, and became a cleric. The uncles had offered Clotilde a sword or shears. Clodoald took the shears himself.
Everything the Church honours in him is contained in that gesture. It was not a defeat accepted but a renunciation made; the boy who had every right, human and dynastic, to spend his life recovering what had been stolen from him, and to make his uncles pay for his brothers, walked away from the whole of it. He is the first of the Merovingians to have chosen the cloister over the crown, and one of the very few princes of that bloodstained house of whom no act of violence is recorded.
III. Apostolatus
Gregory gives the shape of what followed in a single clause: bonisque operibus insistens, presbyter ab hac vita migravit — persevering in good works, he departed this life a priest. For the detail the Church has been dependent on a later Life (see §V), and the detail is of two kinds.
First, that he sought instruction. The Vita makes him the disciple of a hermit named Severinus, living in a cell near Paris, under whose direction he was formed in the monastic discipline; and it reports that, finding himself still too near the court and too well known, he withdrew for a time into Provence, where he lived as a solitary and where the first stories of his charity and his miracles are set. Then, the Vita says, he returned to the neighbourhood of Paris, and was received with joy by the people, who had not forgotten whose son he was.
Second, that he was ordained. About the year 551 Eusebius, Bishop of Paris, ordained him priest — at the request, the Vita says, of the Parisians themselves. He was by then a man of thirty, and he had been a cleric by his own hand for nearly twenty years. He did not use the priesthood to return to the world. He chose a place on the Seine a little downstream from Paris called Novigentum — Nogent — and there, on land which the Vita implies he still held from his inheritance, he built a small church in honour of Saint Martin and gathered around himself a community of disciples, half hermitage and half parish, from which he ministered to the people of the surrounding country.
There is a tradition, preserved in the Vita and repeated by the later writers, that his uncle Childebert — the one who had wept — made over to him lands for the foundation, and that the reconciliation was real. The Church has never made much of it, and neither did Clodoald. What is certain is that his apostolate was of the quiet kind: the instruction of his monks, the care of the poor of Nogent, the ordinary sacramental labour of a country priest who happened to be the grandson of Clovis and could have been a king.
IV. Mors et Cultus
He died at Nogent on the seventh of September, about the year 560, aged something under forty, and was buried in his own church of Saint Martin. His uncles both outlived him. Childebert died in 558 and Chlothar, having gathered the whole Frankish realm into his single hand, in 561 — so that the murderer of Clodoald’s brothers ended as sole king of all the Franks, and the boy who had walked away from a third of Orléans ended as a country priest with a small church. Providence keeps its own accounts.
His cult was immediate and local. The church at Nogent became the church of his tomb; the Vita speaks of miracles at it, and of the veneration of the people of Paris. By the ninth century the place itself had taken his name, and the town of Saint-Cloud stands there still, with the château and the great park that the French kings later built around the shrine of a prince who had refused to be one. A college of canons was attached to his church, dependent on the cathedral chapter of Paris, and the Bishops of Paris, and then of Versailles, kept his feast on the seventh of September with a proper Office.
His relics remained at Saint-Cloud through the Middle Ages and were the object of a considerable pilgrimage. What survived the Revolution is honoured there today, in the parish church that succeeded the collegiate; a portion of the relics is also kept in the cathedral of Paris. Because of a pun on his French name — clou, a nail — he was long invoked as the patron of nail-makers, a devotion which tells us nothing about the saint and something agreeable about the French.
The Roman Martyrology names him on the seventh of September: at Nogent, near Paris, Saint Clodoald, priest and confessor, who, being the son of King Chlodomer and having escaped the murder of his brothers, renounced the world and gave himself to God.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
The sources for Saint Cloud stand in two clearly separated ranks, and it is important to the honesty of his memory that they be kept separate.
The first rank is Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem III, 6 and III, 18, written in the last quarter of the sixth century by a bishop who was born within a few years of the events and who moved among the sons and grandsons of the men involved. Gregory gives the murder of the princes, Clotilde’s answer to the sword and the shears, Clodoald’s escape, his self-tonsure, and his death as a priest. This is as near a contemporary witness as the sixth century affords, and every substantive claim in §§ I, II, and the close of III rests upon it.
The second rank is the anonymous Vita sancti Clodoaldi, which the Bollandists print for the seventh of September and which is generally placed in the ninth century — that is, three hundred years after the saint’s death. It is a devout and sober piece of writing by the standards of its kind, and it plainly draws on Gregory; but it also supplies everything Gregory does not: Severinus, the sojourn in Provence, the ordination by Eusebius, the foundation at Nogent, the miracles, and the reconciliation with Childebert. None of this is impossible; some of it, notably the ordination and the Nogent foundation, is intrinsically probable and is corroborated by the existence of the cult itself. But it should be received as tradition — the memory of a house that had kept his tomb for three centuries — and not as documentary history. The story of the cloak he gave to a beggar, and of the miraculous provision that followed, belongs entirely to this rank, and is retained here as the piety of Nogent rather than as fact.
What no source records is any word Saint Cloud spoke. He left no writings, no rule, no sayings. He is one of those saints whose whole teaching is a single act, and the act is preserved by an author who had no interest in edifying anyone: Gregory of Tours reports the self-tonsure as a political fact, in the middle of a chronicle of murders. That is, perhaps, the strongest testimony it could have.
VI. Oratio
The Missal of 1962 provides no Collect for Saint Cloud. The Collect of the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop, from the Mass Os iusti, may be used devotionally in his honour:
Deus, qui nos beati Clodoaldi Confessoris tui annua solemnitate lætificas: concede propitius; ut cuius natalitia colimus, etiam actiones imitemur.
“O God, who dost gladden us by the yearly solemnity of blessed Clodoald, Thy Confessor: mercifully grant that we who keep his birthday may also imitate his deeds.”
The deeds to be imitated are, in his case, chiefly one; and it is a deed within reach of anyone who has ever held on to a grievance as if it were an inheritance.
VII. Aspiratio
Sancte Clodoalde, qui regnum terrenum propriis manibus abscidisti, ut cæleste acquireres: impetra nobis ut, dimissis iniuriis et relictis quæ nostra sunt, Deum solum in domo eius abiecti sequamur.
“Saint Cloud, who didst cut away with thine own hands an earthly kingdom that thou mightest gain a heavenly one: obtain for us that, forgiving injuries and leaving what is ours, we may follow God alone, abject in His house.”
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Gregory of Tours, Historiae III, 18, in any translation, is the necessary text and takes ten minutes to read. The Bollandist Life is in the Acta Sanctorum for September, volume III. For the Merovingian setting, the reader may go to the wider narrative of Gregory’s third book, and to the life of Saint Clotilde (3 June), whose grief is the other half of this story. Saint Cloud belongs with the small company of royal renunciants — Saint Bathildis, Saint Sigismund, and in a later age Saint Casimir — and with the larger company of those who chose to forgive what could not be undone.
Practice
Examine. Is there a kingdom you are still trying to get back — a position, a recognition, a debt owed you by someone who wronged you — and has the getting of it become the shape of your life? Saint Cloud had a better claim than you, and better reasons for vengeance, and he cut his own hair.
Do. Forgive one thing this week that you have been holding as a right. Do not announce it. Simply stop administering it.
Pray. Psalm 83, slowly, attending to the eleventh verse; or the Collect above.
Devote. The Fourth Sorrowful Mystery — the Carrying of the Cross — asking the grace to lay down what is ours without complaint; or a visit to the Blessed Sacrament made in the spirit of one who has chosen to be a doorkeeper rather than a king.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path treats the conversion of the Franks and the Merovingian Church in which Saint Cloud lived — Clovis, Clotilde, and the strange marriage of barbarian kingship and Catholic faith that produced both the murders and the saint. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the royal saints who kept their crowns — Stephen, Louis, Henry, Edward — and with those, like Clodoald, who set them down.
Sancte Clodoalde, ora pro nobis.