Saint Bruno
Saint Bruno was born at Cologne around 1040 and received his earliest education there. Subsequently he became rector of the cathedral school at Rheims in France, but, depressed by the wickedness of his times, in 1086, with six companions, he went to the wild mountain country of Chartreuse, near Grenoble, where he founded the order of the Carthusians, one of the most austere of the monastic orders. Bruno and his companions each had a separate cell in which they practised the severities of the rule of St Benedict, keeping silence during six days of the week and seeing one another only on Sundays. Pope Urban II, who had been one of Bruno’s most eminent scholars, summoned him to Rome in 1089. Bruno obeyed the call reluctantly and steadily refused all offers of preferment. In 1094 he established a second Carthusian monastery at Della Torre, in a solitary district of Calabria, where he died. He left no written regulations for his followers, these first appearing in a complete form in 1581. He was canonized in 1628. His feast day is 6 October. (Brockhampton, 1996)