BENNO, bishop of MEISSEN, saint. — Of a Saxon comital family, brother of Count Cristoforo, he was a canon at Goslar when, in 1066, he was appointed by Henry IV as bishop of Meissen. He practiced, more than was usual among German prelates, evangelical poverty. In the conflict stirred up between the emperor and the Saxons, he took the side of his fellow countrymen, which exposed him, after peace had been made, to Henry’s reprisals. The firm stance of the Church, now moving toward extreme measures to combat lay interference, obliged Henry, on the morrow of his excommunication, to recall the exiled bishops, among them B.
The bishop’s attitude, in turn, was decisive: in 1078, at the Diet of Forchheim, he was among the seven Saxon bishops who elected Rudolph of Swabia against Henry, and at Rudolph’s death, Herman of Salm. In the following years he was one of the most ardent champions of the papal party and of the reforming Church. The assembly at Mainz in May 1085 struck him, along with the other opponents of Henry’s policy, stripping him of his see and exiling him. But later the conciliatory tendency prevailed in B.’s mind: this tendency, the crisis in the Church at the death of Gregory VII, and perhaps the desire to return to his Meissen, by then occupied by the imperial bishop Felix, led him to come to Italy and submit to the antipope Guibert, who restored him to imperial favor. Restored to his see, he worked, even in writing, for the reconciliation of the two theses in his treatise *De unitate Ecclesiae conservanda*. In 1097, however, he acknowledged Urban II as the true Pontiff. From then on the sources are silent about him: one can only suppose that he died a few years later, between 1105 and 1107.
The cult of B. arose late, on the occasion of the restructuring of the cathedral of Meissen. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the local clergy took up the cause of his canonization: and on 31 May 1523 Adrian VI solemnly canonized him and fixed his feast on the supposed date of his death, 16 June (1106). The following year, on the occasion of a new translation of his relics, Martin Luther, judging that the new saint had not in his lifetime given proof of heroic faith and that the Saxon environment and the interests of the Meissen clergy had influenced the process, did not let slip the opportunity to attack in a pamphlet this form of the much-deplored worldliness of the Church (*Wider den newen Abgott und alten Teuffel, der zu Meissen sol erhaben werden* [in *M. Luthers Werke*, XV, Weimar 1899], pp. 170–98). Hieronymus Emser, who had published a *Vita* of B. in 1512 (which remains the fullest source for knowledge of the bishop, despite its legendary character), replied to Luther with an *Anticurt* against the “shameful book” against Bishop Benno of Meissen, published in Dresden the same year, 1524. Other Protestants and Catholics echoed the controversy. It also had repercussions on the fate of the bishop’s relics: the introduction of the Reformation in the duchy of Saxony led to the destruction of the altar and tomb of the saint, but Bishop John VIII of Meissen managed to bring the relics to his castle at Stolp. There they remained for only a short time: transferred to Wurzen, then to Munich, they finally found rest, after 1580, in the cathedral. B. is still venerated by the Catholics of Meissen and all Bavaria as their patron saint.