Saint Engelbert of Cologne, Archbishop and Martyr
Ego sum pastor bonus. Bonus pastor animam suam dat pro ovibus suis. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.” (John 10:11)
I. A note on this entry
St. Engelbert is an unusual saint, and he should be told honestly. He was not a monk or a mystic. For most of his life he was a great lord of the Empire who happened to be a churchman. He held rich benefices as a boy, fought in a civil war, was excommunicated by Pope Innocent III, and as archbishop ruled his lands with a sword in his hand. The monk who wrote his life at the command of his successor did not hide any of this. He presented Engelbert as a man whose virtues and faults were both on a large scale, and whose death redeemed his life.
The Church has never canonized him by a formal process. A papal legate declared him a martyr at his burial, the people of Cologne honoured him as a saint from the start, and his name was later entered in the Roman Martyrology. His claim to the title of martyr rests on the cause for which he died: he was killed for defending a community of consecrated women against a powerful man who was plundering them. That cause was the liberty of the Church, the same cause for which St. Thomas Becket had died at Canterbury fifty-five years before.
II. The House of Berg
Engelbert was born about 1185 or 1186, probably at Schloss Burg on the Wupper, the castle of his family. His father was Engelbert I, Count of Berg; his mother was Margaret, daughter of the Count of Gelderland. The Counts of Berg were among the most powerful families of the Lower Rhine. They had already given the see of Cologne more than one archbishop, and they intended to give it more.
As a younger son, Engelbert was destined for the Church in the manner of his class. He was educated at the cathedral school of Cologne. While still a boy he held the provostships of St. George and St. Severin in Cologne and of St. Mary’s at Aachen. About 1199, when he was about fourteen years old, he was elected provost of the cathedral of Cologne. None of these offices required him to be a priest, and he was not yet one. They were sources of income and influence, and his family secured them for him.
This was a common abuse of the age, and the reforming popes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries fought it. It should be named for what it was. A child was given the care of churches whose revenues were meant for the worship of God and the relief of the poor, because of the house he was born into.
III. The civil war and the excommunication
In 1198 the Empire split between two rival kings: Philip of Swabia, of the House of Staufen, and Otto of Brunswick, of the House of Welf. The archbishop of Cologne at the time was Adolf of Altena, Engelbert’s kinsman. Adolf first crowned Otto and then went over to Philip, and in 1205 he crowned Philip at Aachen. Pope Innocent III, who supported Otto, excommunicated and deposed Adolf, and the Cologne chapter elected Bruno of Sayn in his place.
Engelbert took his cousin’s side. He did more than vote for him: he took up arms and made war in Adolf’s cause. The ancient sources say plainly that he plundered churches and church lands in the course of it. Before 1206 the Pope excommunicated him with Adolf, and he was deprived of his provostship.
About 1208 he submitted to the Holy See and was restored. To make amends for what he had done, he took the cross in 1212 and joined the crusade against the Albigensians in southern France. He served there for some time with other German nobles. This was penance in the form his age understood: a man who had fought against the Church would now fight for her.
IV. Archbishop of Cologne
On 29 February 1216 the cathedral chapter of Cologne elected Engelbert archbishop unanimously. He was about thirty years old. He was ordained and consecrated, and he took possession of one of the greatest sees of Christendom. The archbishop of Cologne was a prince of the Empire, one of the electors of the king, and in his own lands both lord and bishop.
In 1218 his elder brother, Count Adolf of Berg, died on crusade at Damietta, and Engelbert inherited the county of Berg as well. He defended it in arms against the Duke of Limburg and the Count of Cleves.
He was a vigorous ruler. He built fortresses, kept the peace of the roads, repressed robber knights, and enforced the law against the nobility without exception for his own relatives. He brought the citizens of Cologne, who had long resisted their archbishops, under his authority. The Catholic Encyclopedia remarks that he acted more like a sovereign prince than a bishop, and that devout men of his own day criticized him for it.
But he did not neglect the Church. He welcomed the Friars Minor to Cologne in 1219, while St. Francis was still alive, and the Friars Preachers in 1221, the year St. Dominic died. He supported the monasteries and encouraged them to keep strict observance. He held provincial synods to regulate the affairs of the clergy. Caesarius of Heisterbach records that a friar once rebuked him to his face for burdening the people with taxes, and that the archbishop, whom nobody else dared to contradict, answered that the friar was right.
V. Guardian of the realm
In 1220 Frederick II went south to be crowned emperor at Rome, and he never returned to Germany to govern it in person. He left his young son Henry, already elected King of the Romans, in Germany. He named Engelbert as the boy’s guardian and as administrator of the realm. For five years the archbishop of Cologne was in effect the regent of Germany.
On 8 May 1222 Engelbert crowned Henry at Aachen. In 1223, at the diet of Nordhausen, he concluded a treaty with Denmark for the release of the captured Danish king. He kept the peace of the Empire as far as one man could, and he was respected for it. The poet Walther von der Vogelweide, the greatest lyric poet of medieval Germany, wrote verses in his praise while he lived, and verses of lament and curse after his murder.
VI. The nuns of Essen
The convent of Essen was one of the oldest and richest houses of consecrated women in Germany, an imperial foundation going back to the ninth century. Like every great church of the time, it had a secular advocate, the Vogt, a nobleman whose duty was to protect its lands and represent it in the courts. In Engelbert’s day the advocate was Count Frederick of Isenberg, a cousin of the archbishop.
Frederick used the office to do the opposite of what it was for. He seized the nuns’ revenues, oppressed their tenants, and treated the abbey’s lands as his own. The nuns appealed, and Pope Honorius III and the Emperor both urged Engelbert to protect them. He tried at first to settle the matter by negotiation. When that failed, he moved to restrain his cousin and to strip him of the rights he was abusing.
Frederick had powerful allies. Two of his brothers were bishops: Dietrich of Isenberg at Münster and Engelbert of Isenberg at Osnabrück. They were later suspected of knowing what he intended. Caesarius says that Frederick’s wife urged him on. A number of the nobles of Westphalia, who resented the archbishop’s strong hand, joined him.
Engelbert was warned that his life was in danger. He did not change his course. Caesarius records that before the end he made a full confession of his whole life to the Bishop of Minden, as a man preparing for death.
VII. Gevelsberg
In the first days of November 1225 Engelbert was at Soest in Westphalia, where a hearing was held on the dispute. Frederick was there as well. On the seventh of November the archbishop set out from Soest for Schwelm, where he was to consecrate a church the next day. He travelled with a small escort. Frederick rode part of the way with him.
At dusk, in a narrow sunken road near Gevelsberg, between the present cities of Hagen and Wuppertal, Frederick’s men fell on the party. Most of the escort fled. Engelbert was wounded in the thigh, pulled from his horse, and struck again and again where he lay. When his body was found it bore forty-seven wounds.
Historians still debate what Frederick intended. Some think he meant to take the archbishop prisoner and force terms on him, and that the attack went further than he planned. Caesarius, writing within a year, treats it as murder, and the courts of the time treated it so. Whatever Frederick meant, the men who struck the archbishop forty-seven times meant to kill him.
His body was laid on a cart that had been used to carry dung, the only vehicle that could be found, and brought to Cologne on the fourth day. The young King Henry wept over it. He put Frederick under the ban of the Empire. Frederick was taken a year later, and in November 1226 he was broken on the wheel outside the gates of Cologne. His two brothers lost their sees. Caesarius records that most of the men who had joined in the deed came to violent or wretched ends.
VIII. Burial and cultus
On 24 February 1226 the papal legate, Cardinal Conrad of Urach, laid Engelbert’s body in the old cathedral of Cologne in the presence of a great assembly. He declared the archbishop a martyr. This was the nearest thing to a canonization that Engelbert ever received.
The new archbishop, Henry of Müllenark, ordered Caesarius of Heisterbach, the Cistercian monk who was the best-known writer of the Rhineland, to write his life. Caesarius was reluctant but obeyed. He wrote two books on Engelbert’s life and death and a third on the miracles reported at his tomb, beginning in 1226. His work is the main source for everything told here. He was honest about his subject. He did not pretend that Engelbert had been a holy bishop all his life. He argued instead that God had allowed a worldly man to die a martyr’s death, and that the death had purified the life. He also said that the archbishop had been a great defender of the peace and that his loss was felt by the whole land.
A convent of nuns was founded at Gevelsberg on the place where he died, so that prayer would be offered there for ever. Some of his relics went to the abbey of Altenberg, the burial church of the Counts of Berg, and Essen keeps a reliquary bust of him. In the early seventeenth century the cult was renewed. His name was entered in the Roman Martyrology on the seventh of November, and Archbishop Ferdinand of Bavaria fixed his feast for that day in the archdiocese of Cologne in 1618 and solemnly raised his remains in 1622. A silver shrine was made for them in the following decade. It stands today in Cologne Cathedral.
In art he is shown in the vestments of an archbishop, with a crozier in one hand and a sword in the other.
IX. What his life teaches
That a man can be converted late, and converted by duty. Engelbert did not leave the world for the cloister. He was converted in a different way, by accepting the duties of his office and carrying them to the end. He could have let his cousin go on robbing the nuns of Essen. Every consideration of family and prudence urged him to. He did not. Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).
That the Church’s goods belong to God. The lands of Essen were given to God for the support of women who had consecrated their lives to Him. Frederick of Isenberg treated them as plunder, and Engelbert had done the same thing himself in his youth. The archbishop died defending what he had once violated. Whatever is given to God for His worship and His poor is not ours to take, whether we are counts or governments or anyone else.
That penance is possible. Engelbert was excommunicated as a young man for making war on the Church. He submitted, did penance, and spent the rest of his life making amends. Caesarius tells us that he made a full confession before his death. No sin is beyond the reach of the Precious Blood, if the sinner repents. Where sin abounded, grace did more abound (Rom. 5:20).
That power is a trust. Engelbert held great power in Church and State, and he used it, for good and sometimes for ill. The saints who held power, such as St. Louis IX and St. Henry II, show what it is for: to protect the weak, to restrain the strong, and to keep the peace in which men can serve God. Engelbert died because he used his power for that purpose at last, against his own kin.
That the honest telling of a life is part of the honour of a saint. Caesarius did not make Engelbert into a plaster saint, and the Church did not require him to. God is glorified more by the truth of what His grace does with a real man than by a legend. We may honour Engelbert precisely because we know what he was.
Practice
Examine. Is there an injustice that I could remedy, but that I let pass because the one committing it is a friend, a relative, or a person I do not want to offend? Have I ever taken or kept what belongs to the Church or to the poor? Have I made a full and honest confession, as Engelbert did when he knew he might die? How do I use whatever authority I have, at home, at work, or in my parish: for my own comfort or for the protection of those under me?
Do. Give something this week to a community of contemplative nuns, or write to one and ask what they need. If you have authority over others, look for one person under your care who is being treated unjustly, and act to protect them. If you have put off confession, go this week.
Pray. St. Engelbert has no proper Collect in the General Calendar of the 1962 Missal. Pray the Collect of the Common of a Martyr Bishop:
Infirmitatem nostram respice, omnipotens Deus: et, quia pondus propriæ actionis gravat, beati Engelberti Martyris tui atque Pontificis intercessio gloriosa nos protegat. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“Look upon our weakness, O almighty God: and since the burden of our own deeds weighs us down, may the glorious intercession of blessed Engelbert, Thy Martyr and Bishop, protect us. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Bonus pastor animam suam dat pro ovibus suis. “The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.”
Devote. In this month of the holy souls, pray for the soul of Frederick of Isenberg and for all who took part in the deed at Gevelsberg, as the nuns there prayed for centuries. Ask St. Engelbert to obtain for the Church bishops who will defend the weak against the powerful, even when the powerful are their own.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path follows the struggle over the liberty of the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the Investiture Contest, the advocacy system, St. Thomas Becket, and the conflict of the papacy with the Staufen emperors. The Lives of the Saints path sets Engelbert beside Becket and St. Stanislaus of Kraków, bishops killed by the powerful for defending the Church’s rights, and beside St. Henry II and St. Louis IX, who held temporal power as saints. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up what makes a death a martyrdom, following St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 124), who teaches that one may be a martyr for any virtue that is ordered to God, and so for justice, and not only for the confession of a point of faith.
Sancte Engelberte, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; Caesarius of Heisterbach, Vita, Passio et Miracula S. Engelberti (ed. F. Zschaeck, 1937; also in the Acta Sanctorum*, November, and Surius,* Vitae Sanctorum*, 7 November); Aegidius Gelenius,* Vindex libertatis ecclesiasticae et martyr S. Engelbertus (Cologne, 1633); the Roman Martyrology; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 124; Butler’s Lives of the Saints (Thurston-Attwater, 7 November); the Catholic Encyclopedia and the New Catholic Encyclopedia*. The words of Caesarius are given in paraphrase. Several dates, and Frederick’s intention at Gevelsberg, remain disputed among historians.*