John Gualbert, Saint

JOHN GUALBERT, Saint. - Founder of the Order of the Vallombrosans, b. in Florence in the last decades of the 10th century (985, or more probably 995) of the noble Visdomini family, d. on 12 July 1073 in the monastery of St. Michael the Archangel at Passignano, near Florence, and there buried. He seems to have been made a knight of the Empire by Henry II. Having met one day, perhaps Good Friday, the murderer of one of his kinsmen or, according to another tradition, of his own brother Hugh, he granted him the pardon that the adversary, on his knees, begged for the sake of the Passion of Christ. Shortly afterwards, in the church of St. Minias he saw the Crucifix bow its head repeatedly as a sign of approval of the heroic act, and he decided to become a Benedictine monk.

Having soon departed from it because of the disorders he found there, he took refuge in the hermitage of Camaldoli, whose founder, St. Romuald of Ravenna, he came to know. Here, in prayer, he understood that the Lord was calling him to found a new congregation to combat the plague of simony and the Nicolaitan heresy. He therefore withdrew with some companions, around 1030, into a wooded hollow of Mount Pratomagno called Acqua Bella, later Valle Ombrosa, leading there for some years a eremitic life. In 1038 he founded here the monastery of Vallombrosa and gave his monks the Rule of St. Benedict with statutes of their own. G. was the first founder who received lay brothers into the Congregation and united several monasteries under a single abbot general. After Vallombrosa there followed at a short distance the foundations of S. Salvi, Moscheta and Passignano, with houses for the poor and the sick alongside them.

He had to struggle bitterly against the simoniac Peter Mezzabarba, archbishop of Florence, who in revenge had the monastery of S. Salvi set on fire and its monks killed. He was canonized by Celestine III in 1193.

Ulderico Vicentini