GERARDO di CSANÀD, saint. — Benedictine theologian, bishop, and protomartyr of Hungary, born in Venice into the Sagredo family at the end of the 10th century, died at Bagno Rudas on 24 September 1046. A religious at S. Giorgio in Isola (later S. Giorgio Maggiore), he soon became its prior (1012); sent to Bologna, already known as a center of learning, he studied the liberal arts and philosophy there; having returned to Venice, he was elected abbot of his monastery (1021). After a few years of wise government, he resigned his office in order to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where his father had died fighting against the infidels. Passing through Hungary, he was detained by King St. Stephen (997–1036), who entrusted him with the education of his only son, St. Emeric. He then withdrew to the hermitage of Bèl (Bakony Forest), where he remained until 1029, the year in which the king entrusted him with the newly established bishopric of Csanàd (Cianadino); there he worked with extraordinary zeal for the conversion of the pagans. He took an active part in the affairs of the nascent kingdom; he went to France as Stephen’s legate, and later accompanied him to Ravenna and Rome. Hungary rightly regards St. G. as the godfather of the “apostolic kingdom” and the apostle of Marian devotion, so deeply rooted among the people that from then on they greeted the Virgin as « Patrona Hungariae ». The disorders that arose among the successors of St. Stephen led to a revolt by the surviving pagans, who inflicted a cruel death on G.
G. combined his activity with an intense life of study. Of his works, there remains the Deliberatio Gerardi Moresanae Ecclesiae episcopi supra hymnum irium puerorum ad Isingrium liberalem, preserved in cod. 6211 of the National Library of Munich and published by I. Batthyani, Sancti Gerhardi ep. Chanadiensis scripta et acta hactenus inedita (Karlsburg 1790), where G., among other things, shows himself fairly favorable to the study of philosophy, provided that its inferiority to Revelation is acknowledged. In this work he says that he had written three others (now lost): a commentary on the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews and on the First Epistle of St. John, and a short work De divino patrimonio. According to Sansovino, he also wrote some oratorical works and a De laudibus B. M. V.: Giacomo da Varazze, in his Legenda aurea (ed. Th. Graesse, Leipzig 1850, p. 511), in fact cites a collection of Marian homilies by G.