Saints Mayeul and Odilo
Fourth and fifth abbots of Clunyc. 906–994 and c. 962–1049
Feast · May 11 for Saint Mayeul and January 1 for Saint Odilo, in the Roman Martyrology
Life
Mayeul and Odilo, the fourth and fifth abbots of Cluny, governed the Burgundian abbey one after the other from about 954 until 1049. Under them Cluny stood at the head of a family of reformed monasteries that reached into Burgundy, Provence, Auvergne, Italy and Spain, all living under the Rule of Saint Benedict.
Mayeul was born about 906 to a family of Avignon and grew up at Mâcon, where he was a canon and then archdeacon. He entered Cluny under Abbot Aymard, was made his coadjutor around 948 and succeeded him around 954, when Aymard had gone blind. In 972, crossing the Alps on his way back from Pavia, he was seized by Saracens from Fraxinet and freed once a ransom had been raised. Two years later Empress Adelaide and her son Otto II wished to make him pope, and he refused. He reformed monasteries in Italy and in France, among them Saint-Bénigne of Dijon, and he died at the Cluniac priory of Souvigny on May 11, 994, while traveling to reform the abbey of Saint-Denis.
Odilo was born about 962 into the noble house of Mercœur in Auvergne and was a canon of Saint-Julien at Brioude before he entered Cluny in 991. Mayeul chose him as coadjutor, and he was made abbot shortly before Mayeul’s death. During his long abbacy the houses depending on Cluny grew from 37 to 65, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, and he promoted the Truce of God, which forbade fighting on fixed days and seasons. In the famines of 1028 to 1033 his charity saved thousands from death. He declined the archbishopric of Lyon, offered to him by Popes John XIX and Benedict IX, and Fulbert of Chartres called him the archangel of the monks.
Odilo instituted at Cluny and its houses a yearly commemoration of all the faithful departed on November 2, the day after All Saints, and the practice soon spread through the Western Church. The year is often given as 998, while the Catholic Encyclopedia places it after 1030. Odilo died at Souvigny on the night of December 31, 1048, at about eighty-seven, and was buried beside Mayeul.
Further reading: Romanesque France: Cluny and the Churches of the Pilgrim Roads.
Cult and relics
Hugh Capet made pilgrimages to Mayeul’s tomb in the years after his death, and the double tomb of the two abbots made the priory church of Souvigny a busy place of pilgrimage; from the twelfth to the fifteenth century it stood in the middle of the nave. Peter Damian began the cause of Odilo’s canonization in 1063 and wrote his life. The Roman Martyrology names Mayeul on May 11 and Odilo on January 1.
In 1793 revolutionaries burned the relics of both saints and broke their tomb and its effigies. Archaeologists opened the double tomb in 2001, and in 2008 the monument was rebuilt from some 2,400 fragments found in the excavations. It stands again in the nave, and reliquary busts of the two abbots are kept in a cabinet beside it. In the United States the parish of Saint Odilo in Berwyn, Illinois, near Chicago, is the National Shrine of the Souls in Purgatory.
In art
The two abbots appear as recumbent stone effigies on their tomb at Souvigny, worn smooth by pilgrims. A statue of Mayeul stands in the priory church, and the basilica of Saint-Urbain in Troyes has a statue of Odilo. Both are shown as Benedictine abbots, in the monastic habit with the crosier.