STEPHEN HARDING, Saint. - His date of birth is unknown; he died on 28 March 1134. At the age of sixteen or eighteen, disgusted, he left the abbey of Sherborne, to which his parents, a well-to-do family of Dorset, had entrusted him as an oblate; he visited Scotland, went on to Paris to study, and made a pilgrimage to Rome.
He was, it was said, a cheerful companion; but the memory of the cloister never ceased to haunt him. Therefore, on his return, passing through Molesmes, he stayed there until the day when, in 1098, with Abbot Robert, Prior Aubry and a few other monks, they abandoned the relaxed life of Molesmes and went to found a new monastery in the wild moorland of Citeaux. When, the following year, the pontifical legate Hugh, archbishop of Lyon, in agreement with the bishops and abbots of the province, obliged Robert to return to Molesmes and Aubry became abbot, S. replaced him as prior, awaiting his own succession as abbot.
It was precisely during the abbatial rule of S. (1108-1134) that the true flourishing of Citeaux occurred. The beginnings had been difficult, because the extreme austerity of the Cistercian life kept the young away; but everything changed on the day when a young man, Bernard of Fontaines, together with several of his relatives and friends, asked to take part in that life (1112). From that time Citeaux sent out colonies to La Ferté-sur-Grosne, Pontigny, Morimond and Trois Fontaines; at the death of S., the Order numbered 75 abbeys (1134).
The influence of S. can be measured by the rigor with which the strict observance of the Benedictine Rule had been maintained at Citeaux and in its daughter houses. Hostile to all wealth and to all interference from the world, S. forbade the duke of Burgundy to hold his court in the abbey, even at the risk of depriving himself of the generosity of his protector and of obliging his monks to beg. To S. also goes the strict poverty of the furnishings of the conventual church; moreover, the beginnings and primitive customs of Citeaux were described by him in the Exordium parvum; from him too comes the Carta Caritatis, the rule governing the mutual relations among the Cistercian abbots. If one adds further that S., combining intellectual with manual work, made for the use of the monks a recension of the Vulgate, one will have the measure of the importance of his influence on the destinies of the Cistercian Order. Feast formerly on 17 April, since 1683 on 16 July. It is not established that he was canonized.
Bibliography10 works
Guglielmo Mollat