Saint Norbert

Norbert was born about 1080 in the Rhineland, at Xanten according to most accounts, though some give Gennep. A younger son of a noble family, he was destined for the Church, received the subdiaconate and became a canon of the collegiate church of Saint Victor at Xanten. His Life tells that his horse, frightened by a bolt of lightning, threw him to the ground, and that he rose resolved to change his life. In 1115 he was ordained deacon and priest.

His efforts to reform his fellow canons failed, and at the Council of Fritzlar in 1118 he was denounced as an innovator. He gave up his benefice, and Pope Gelasius II allowed him to preach as an itinerant in the lands of today’s western Germany, Belgium and northern France. At the Council of Reims in October 1119, Pope Calixtus II asked him to found a religious house in the diocese of Laon, and Bishop Barthélemy de Jur offered him land.

In 1120 Norbert chose a lonely valley in the forest of Coucy, west of Laon, called Prémontré. On Christmas Day 1121 the first brothers made their profession there under the Rule of Saint Augustine, and the order counts its foundation from that day. The canons joined preaching and the care of souls to a life of common prayer, and Pope Honorius II approved the order in 1126. At Antwerp Norbert fought the Eucharistic heresy of a preacher named Tanchelm, and he is honored there as the Apostle of Antwerp.

In July 1126 he became Archbishop of Magdeburg, and Blessed Hugh of Fosse succeeded him at the head of Prémontré. About 1130 he upheld Pope Innocent II against the antipope Anacletus II. He died at Magdeburg on June 6, 1134.

Pope Gregory XIII canonized Norbert in 1582, and his memorial on June 6 is in the General Roman Calendar. He was buried at Magdeburg in the church of his canons. The abbey of Strahov in Prague, after repeated attempts, obtained his body during the Thirty Years’ War; it was installed there on May 2, 1627, and rests there today. At Prémontré the abbey was suppressed and largely dismantled in the Revolution; the Department of the Aisne bought the site in 1861, and it has housed a psychiatric hospital since 1867.

In France the canons settled at Frigolet, near Tarascon, in 1858. Canons from the Belgian abbey of Grimbergen returned to Mondaye, near Bayeux, on June 13, 1859, and the community came back again in 1921 after an exile. The community of Mondaye also has a priory at Conques, where it serves the abbey church of Sainte-Foy. For the nine hundredth anniversary of Prémontré, Pope Francis wrote to the Abbot General on June 6, 2021. In North America, canons from Berne Abbey in the Netherlands, led by Bernard Pennings, founded St. Norbert Abbey in De Pere, Wisconsin, in 1898.

Norbert is shown in the white habit of his canons or in an archbishop’s vestments, holding a monstrance, for his defense of the Eucharist at Antwerp, and often a cross with two bars, the mark of an archbishop. His statue stands above the colonnade of Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, and on the Charles Bridge in Prague he stands between Saints Wenceslas and Sigismund.

Patron of Bohemia and of Magdeburg.

• PrémontréThe site of the first abbey, west of Laon, where three buildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stand on the grounds of a mental health hospital and part of one serves as a church dedicated to Saint Norbert.
• MondayeThe abbey near Bayeux where Premonstratensian canons live and guide visitors through the church rebuilt from 1706 to 1743 under the direction of Eustache Restout.
• FrigoletThe abbey of Saint-Michel de Frigolet in the Montagnette hills near Tarascon, where the canons sing the liturgy in Gregorian chant and pilgrims pray at the chapel of Notre-Dame du Bon Remède.