Today April 17

Today is the feast of St. Stephen Harding, O.Cist. He was born in Dorset and joined St. Robert at Molesme as a monk. He'd actually been a simple monk at Sherborne and sickened of the monastic life and left. He sensibly made a pilgrimage to Rome (perhaps to get his head together) and stopped at the abbey of Molesme on the way back home. He was so impressed with the zeal and level-headedness of St. Robert that he stayed and took the tonsure and white habit. If you think all was smooth thereafter, you haven't been paying attention to the lives of the saints very well! The majority of monks at Molesme didn't want to follow St. Robert's humble and austere ways and finally he was forced to either compromise or move . . . and so he moved out. He left Stephen and the slightly older St. Alberic behind to face the disgruntled monks -- they didn't want Robert but even less did they want him to leave!

What happened next is disputed. One account says Robert and Alberic left shortly after Robert did and both became hermits until the bishop told them to return to their monastery -- which they didn't, exactly, choosing instead to go to a deserted site a few miles south of Dijon known as Cîteaux, from which they got their name, "Cistercians," (from the Latin name for Cîteaux: "Cistericum.") The other was that they DID, in fact, return to Molesme, but then with a few hardy souls (including St. Robert), left to the new place.

And if you think it was finally smooth sailing NOW, well, you don't know the saints very well. Even the few hardy souls weren't all up to the take of building and living in an austere new abbey. The numbers dwindled down to almost nothing. Robert was called back to Molesme, leaving Alberic in charge and when he died in 1108, Stephen was chosen. He could have relaxed the rule, but he held firm. When all looked lost, the gallant St. Bernard of Clairvaux rode up on horseback with 30 companions, all of whom joined the order. Stephen wrote down the rule, encoding it in the Carta Caritatis ("The Charter of Love"), which called for asceticism, hard manual labor and a greatly simplified liturgy. Stephen took it to Pope Callistus II in 1119 and gained approval of it and the order. Stephen resigned in 1133 due to blindness and died in 1134. His influence was obscured by the glory that was St. Bernard, but its importance has been restored with more historical research.