ST. BRUNO, the founder of the Carthusian order of monks, was born at Cologne about the year 1030.
He was educated at Cologne, and afterwards at Rheims, where he was appointed to superintend the studies in all the chief schools of the diocese. Many of his pupils afterwards became distinguished, and in the number was Pope Urban II.
In 1084, after some disputes with Manasses, the archbishop of Rheims, he retired with six companions into the desert of Chartreuse, where he built an oratory, with cells at a little distance from each other.
Six years afterwards he went to Rome, where Urban II pressed him to accept the archbishopric of Reggio. He declined the honour, and withdrew into the solitudes of Calabra where he died October 6, 1101.
He wrote treatises on the Psalms and on some of the Epistles, but none of his works are extant. His canonization took place in 1514. (See Mrs Jameson’s Legends of the Monastic Orders, 124-134; Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol. ii. 592.)
This saint is not to be confounded with others of the same name, -- the bishop and apostle of the Prussians (970-1008), and the great archbishop of Cologne (925-968).
