Saint Stephen Harding

Stephen was born in 1059 in Merriott, near Sherborne, in Dorset, to a noble Saxon family. As a boy he entered the Benedictine abbey of Sherborne and took vows. Then the Normans arrived, England changed masters, and he left monastic life and went off to Scotland. Later he went to Paris to finish his studies. Remorse at having left the monastery took him to Rome on a penitential pilgrimage: he was traveling with a young cleric, and along the way the two recited the entire psalter every day. On their way back toward England they stopped in Burgundy, at the abbey of Molesme, and there Stephen met Robert of Molesme, who was trying to bring the Benedictines back to a more austere life. Out of that meeting came Cîteaux. In 1098 Robert, Alberic and Stephen left Molesme to found a new monastery on marshy, inhospitable land. Stephen was its third abbot, and he was the one who gave the order the thing that made it last: the Charta Caritatis, the document that governed relations among the Cistercian abbeys — independent but linked, visited every year, gathered in a general chapter. It is considered one of the most intelligent institutional texts of the Middle Ages. It was he who, in 1113, welcomed to Cîteaux a young Burgundian who arrived with thirty companions: his name was Bernard. He died at Cîteaux on March 28, 1134. If your name is Stephen, today is your name day — even though many wait for December 26.