Vigils Reading – SS Warren and Amadeus

ST AMADEUS OF LAUSANNE4 ◊◊◊

Amadeus’ religious formation began, in fact, well before the days of his youth. He was only a few years past the days of his babyhood when his father, Lord Amadeus d’Hauterives of the ancient and noble house of Clermont, turned apostle of monastic life and, sometime around 1119, brought to the newly founded Cistercian abbey of Bonnevaux, near Vienne, not only himself but his ten-year old boy, Amadeus junior, and seventeen knight-companions as well. Whatever else the senior Amadeus had given up in coming to the poor, struggling community of Bonnevaux, he had not given up the idea that his son should receive a solid education. At Bonnevaux the lad did begin receiving an education, but hardly of the sort deemed suitable by his concerned father. The philosophy of education held by the saintly Abbot John… was that ‘the anointing of the Paraclete could teach the lad more in a second than the teachings of an apostate grammarian like Priscian in a stretch of many years. The force of the argument was lost on Amadeus senior. In a moment of depression he apostatized; and one day, probably in the year 1122, he took his son and rode off with him to the great abbey of Cluny, with its tradition of enlightened humanism.

The account of Amadeus senior’s brief, unhappy life as a monk of Cluny, his anguished repentance, and his return to Bonnevaux, belongs to another story. But if Bonnevaux could not provide Amadeus junior with a suitable education, neither could Cluny; for almost immediately the lad was sent for further studies to the court of his kinsman, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the future Emperor Conrad. The three years Amadeus spent in Germany could hardly have sufficed to complete the education of the adolescent, but we nevertheless find him in 1125, shortly after

having fulfilled the minimum age-requirement for acceptance as a Cistercian novice, knocking at the gate of Clairvaux…

For fourteen years young Amadeus had the joy of living under the tutelage of Saint Bernard himself; and it was in this setting of Clairvaux, with all its contagious enthusiasm, devotio iocunda, and seriousness of purpose, that the stripling Amadeus grew to full manhood. The attainments of the mature Amadeus must have impressed even Saint Bernard, who, in 1139, deemed him ready to become abbot of the Savoyard abbey of Hautecombe. This monastery had been founded much earlier in the century, but had become affiliated with the Cistercian Order only in 1135. Amadeus’ abbacy coincided with the change of location of the original abbey and the construction of the monastic buildings; and it was also under Amadeus that the consolidation of the Cistercian ideals in the recently affiliated community took place.

The young abbot’s gifts as administrator and spiritual father were considerable enough to draw attention to him well outside the immediate sphere of the Cistercian family. For when the deplorable Guy de Maligny finally resigned his episcopal dignity in 1144, it was the thirty-four-year-old Abbot Amadeus of Hautecombe whom the clergy and faithful of Lausanne chose to succeed Bishop Guy. Accepting the burden of the episcopal office only at the insistence of Pope Lucius II, Bishop Amadeus remained very much Amadeus the monk. At no time during the troubled fourteen years of his episcopacy did the faithful of Lausanne find reason to regret their choice of pastor; and when Amadeus died on 27 August 1159, those who were with him were well aware that they were attending the deathbed of a saint. The liturgical memorial of Saint Amadeus of Lausanne is celebrated to this day, and is assigned in the Cistercian calendar of saints to August 30