Saint Hugh of Grenoble

Saint Hugh of Grenoble was a bishop who for about half a century renewed the life of the clergy and the faithful of his diocese, although he himself would most gladly have been a monk. It was he who gave Saint Bruno and his companions the mountain hermitage of Chartreuse, where the Carthusian Order was born. The Church commemorates him on April 1.

He was born about 1053 in Châteauneuf-sur-Isère near Valence, in the Dauphiné. His father, Odilo, was a knight, and in old age, on his son’s advice, he became a Carthusian. After years of study Hugh became a canon in Valence. There the papal legate Hugh, bishop of Die, came to know him, took him into his household, and drew him into the work of reforming the Church.

At a synod in Avignon the canons of Grenoble, who were without a shepherd, asked for him as their bishop. He was about twenty-seven, had not yet received holy orders, and resisted for a long time. He was ordained by the legate, and in 1080 Pope Gregory VII himself consecrated him bishop.

In Grenoble he found the Church in decline. Clerics married publicly and traded in sacred things, laypeople had taken possession of churches and tithes, and the people did not know the basics of the faith. Weighed down by the burden of his office, after less than two years he entered the abbey of La Chaise-Dieu as a monk. After a year Gregory VII ordered him to return. From then on Hugh patiently carried out the reform: he preached, heard confessions at length, reconciled enemies, and defended the property of his Church against the powerful. During a famine he sold a gold chalice and rings to feed the poor.

In 1084 Master Bruno came to him with six companions, looking for a place to live as hermits. The Roman Martyrology calls Bruno Hugh’s former teacher. The Life relates that the bishop had earlier seen in a dream God building himself a dwelling in the wilderness of Chartreuse, with seven stars showing the way. He received the newcomers with reverence and himself led them into that mountain valley. This was the beginning of the Grande Chartreuse, the cradle of the Carthusian Order. Hugh often stayed there and lived like one of the brothers, until Bruno would send him back to his sheep.

For forty years he suffered from headaches and stomach pains. He asked successive popes to release him from office, but in vain: it was thought that even in ill health he would do more by his example than anyone else. In 1130 he traveled to Le Puy to stand with other bishops on the side of Pope Innocent II against the antipope Anacletus II. Only in his last illness, which took away his memory of everything except prayer, was a successor chosen for him, a Carthusian. He died on April 1, 1132, on the Friday before Palm Sunday, at about eighty years of age, and was buried in the cathedral of Grenoble.

Innocent II enrolled him among the saints in 1134, two years after his death. In a letter issued in Pisa he instructed Guigo, prior of the Grande Chartreuse, who had known the bishop well, to write his Life. It remains to this day the main source of what we know about the saint.