Saint Stephen Harding

Saint Stephen Harding was an English monk, the third abbot of Cîteaux, and one of the three founders of the Cistercian Order. He received Saint Bernard and his companions into the monastery and gave the growing family of abbeys a common law, the Charter of Charity. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on March 28, the day of his death.

He was born in the eleventh century in southwestern England; the exact year and place of his birth are not certain. As a boy he was placed in the Benedictine monastery at Sherborne. Years later he left it, studied in France, and made a pilgrimage to Rome. On his way back he stopped at the Burgundian abbey of Molesme, which was governed by Saint Robert, and became a monk there.

At Molesme he was among those who wished to keep the Rule of Saint Benedict more faithfully. In 1098, together with Abbot Robert, Alberic, and other brothers, about twenty monks in all, he settled in the solitude of Cîteaux, where the “New Monastery” arose. After a year Robert returned to Molesme, and Alberic became abbot. After Alberic’s death the community elected Stephen; this happened around 1109, for the sources do not agree on the date.

The first years were hard: the community lived in poverty and new vocations were lacking. The turning point came with the arrival of the young Bernard of Fontaine with thirty companions, among them his relatives; some sources give the year 1112, others 1113. From then on new foundations went out from Cîteaux: La Ferté, Pontigny, Clairvaux, and Morimond. In 1115 Stephen entrusted the founding of Clairvaux to Bernard. In 1125 he took under the care of Cîteaux the nuns of Tart, the first monastery of Cistercian nuns. The Roman Martyrology recalls that he established the lay brothers and founded twelve monasteries.

So that the young abbeys might remain united, he bound them together by the Charter of Charity (Carta caritatis), which the tradition of the order attributes to Stephen himself. The Charter joined the monasteries by the bond between a motherhouse and its daughter houses and introduced regular visitations and a yearly general chapter of abbots at Cîteaux. Pope Callixtus II confirmed the statutes of the Cistercians on December 23, 1119. Under Stephen’s direction the text of the Latin Bible was also corrected in the scriptorium of Cîteaux.

In 1133, old and almost blind, he resigned his office. He died at Cîteaux on March 28, 1134. In the course of the twelfth century the order he had helped to found grew to several hundred monasteries throughout Europe.

In the order he was venerated as one of the founding fathers, and the Roman Martyrology lists him among the saints. Studies do not agree about a formal canonization: according to some, a pope declared him a saint in 1623; according to others, he was only entered in the calendar of the order at that time. On January 26 the Cistercians and the Trappists keep a common solemnity of the three founders: Robert, Alberic, and Stephen. In 1998, on the nine hundredth anniversary of Cîteaux, John Paul II recalled that these three, by faithfully observing the Rule of Saint Benedict, gave birth to a new form of monastic life.