The Man Who Made Christendom Listen
MASS In médio Ecclésiæ
LESSON Ecclesiasticus 39:6-14
GOSPEL St Matthew 5:13-19
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
If we hear only the words “St Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot and Doctor of the Church,” we may imagine a remote medieval monk, pious and learned certainly, but belonging to another world and another age. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bernard was one of the most formidable personalities of the twelfth century. Popes sought his counsel; kings listened when he spoke; bishops appealed to him; scholars feared his criticism; monks followed him by the hundreds; ordinary Christians revered him. He intervened in a disputed papal election, confronted theological error, preached across Europe, defended Jews when mobs turned against them, advised a former disciple who had become Pope, and was involved in one of the greatest political and military disasters of his generation. Yet this man who became, in effect, one of the consciences of Christendom possessed no army, no fortune, no episcopal throne and no political office. He was an abbot. He lived in a monastery. And therein lies the first lesson of St Bernard: a man who wants nothing from the world can sometimes speak to the world with an authority which those who covet its approval can never possess.
Bernard was born in 1090 at Fontaines, near Dijon in Burgundy, into a prosperous noble family. He was educated in grammar, rhetoric and dialectic and might readily have made a distinguished career in the world. Instead, as a young man, he entered Cîteaux, taking with him an extraordinary company of relatives and companions whom his own conversion had persuaded to renounce the world. Cîteaux itself was then young. It represented a reforming instinct within Benedictine monasticism: a desire to recover simplicity, poverty, austerity and a more exact observance of the Rule of St Benedict. In 1115, while only about twenty-five, Bernard was sent with a small group of monks to establish a new monastery in a remote valley. That monastery became Clairvaux — the Valley of Light — and Bernard remained its abbot until his death on 20 August 1153. From that valley, astonishingly, his influence spread across Christian Europe. (Vatican)
Why? Not simply because Bernard was intelligent. The twelfth century possessed plenty of intelligent men. Not merely because he was eloquent, although he was extraordinarily so. Holy Church gives us the answer in the Introit of today’s Mass: In medio Ecclesiae aperuit os ejus, et implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiae et intellectus — “In the midst of the Church the Lord opened his mouth, and filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding.” Notice carefully what the liturgy says. The Lord opened his mouth. The Lord filled him. Bernard did not become great by manufacturing an impressive religious personality. Something had first happened to Bernard. Grace had entered, purified, disciplined and transformed him; and because he had first learned to listen, eventually Christendom listened to him.
The Epistle explains the process. The just man “will give his heart to resort early to the Lord his Maker.” He will pray before the Most High. He will ask pardon for his sins. He will meditate upon the mysteries of God. And only then, if it pleases God, “He will fill him with the spirit of understanding,” and his words of wisdom will pour forth “as showers.” There is an entire theology of Christian authority in that sequence. Prayer before speech. Repentance before correction. Contemplation before action. Receiving before giving. Conversion before influence.
And that is perhaps where Bernard becomes disturbingly contemporary. We inhabit an age in which everyone can speak instantly and almost nobody is required first to become wise. An ecclesiastical controversy occurs and within minutes thousands are commenting upon it. We analyse popes, bishops, priests, liturgies, documents, scandals and crises. We know precisely where everybody else has gone wrong. We accumulate information about the Church while neglecting the Church’s purpose, which is to make us saints. Bernard would ask the question we most easily avoid: has all this knowledge made me holier? Has knowing the errors of the age made me pray better? Has defending Catholic Tradition made me more patient, more chaste, more truthful, more charitable, less vain? It is possible to possess perfectly orthodox opinions and still possess a profoundly unconverted heart.
Bernard himself knew that danger because he was no stranger to controversy. His celebrated conflict with Peter Abelard concerned the very nature of theology. Abelard represented the new power of dialectical reasoning; Bernard feared that reason, instead of serving Revelation, could begin sitting in judgement upon it. Bernard was not an enemy of reason—he was himself exceptionally intelligent—but he refused to treat God as though the mysteries of Faith were merely intellectual problems awaiting conquest. Theology existed to bring the soul to God. The mind must understand so that the heart may love; but the theologian who ceases to kneel will eventually mistake intellectual ingenuity for wisdom. Significantly, the conflict between Bernard and Abelard did not end simply in perpetual enmity: through Peter the Venerable there was reconciliation. Truth mattered; so did charity. (Vatican)
That is why Bernard is called the Doctor Mellifluus, the honey-flowing Doctor. The honey was not merely rhetorical sweetness. Bernard had come to understand that Christianity ultimately concerns the possession of God through charity. In his treatise De diligendo Deo, on loving God, he gives the principle with magnificent simplicity: the measure of loving God is to love Him without measure. Most of us, if we are truthful, love God with careful measurements. We calculate what He may have and what we shall retain. God may have Sunday morning, but perhaps not the rest of Sunday. He may have our creed, but not our favourite sin. He may govern our public morality, but not our private imagination. He may have our prayers, provided He does not interfere too drastically with our ambitions, relationships, comforts or resentments. Bernard says: that is not yet the freedom of the saints. God is not one good among several goods competing for an allotted portion of our affection. He is the Good from whom every lesser good receives whatever goodness it possesses.
And Bernard learned this not only through triumph but through failure. He preached the Second Crusade with immense force, believing the cause just and necessary. The result was catastrophic. The expedition collapsed amid military disaster, political confusion and recrimination, and some of that recrimination fell upon Bernard himself. Here the saint becomes more useful to us, not less. Canonisation does not mean that every prudential judgement a saint ever made was correct. Sanctity is not omniscience. Bernard could misjudge events, press too hard, become involved in causes whose consequences he could not foresee. He had earlier had to learn, even as an abbot, that his first severity towards his monks could be excessive. The great man learned gentleness. The successful man experienced failure. The saint discovered his limitations. And yet his faith survived because his faith was ultimately not in Bernard’s ability to be right, but in God.
How desperately Catholics need that lesson. Again and again we attach supernatural expectations to natural personalities. This pope will restore everything; this bishop will resist everything; this priest will provide the answer; this movement will save Tradition; this initiative will reverse the crisis. Then men disappoint us, institutions fail, strategies collapse, and sometimes faith itself begins to tremble because we had imperceptibly transferred to human beings the confidence which belonged to Providence. Bernard had a spiritual son who became Pope Eugenius III. One might imagine this to be the ultimate vindication of Bernard’s influence. Yet what did he do? He wrote De consideratione and warned the Pope that the endless business of governing the Church could consume him until he became a stranger to his own soul. The lesson was severe: one may govern the Church and neglect one’s soul; one may be occupied with holy things and cease oneself to be holy. (Vatican)
Now we understand why today’s Gospel is so exact: “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.” Salt must enter the food, but it must remain salt. Light must enter darkness, but it cannot become darkness. Bernard did not believe that the way to reform the Church was to make Christianity more congenial to the spirit of the age. Cîteaux represented almost the opposite principle: when religious life had become too comfortable, the answer was not to redefine comfort as holiness, but to recover the seriousness of the vocation. There is a lesson here which modern churchmen have repeatedly forgotten. The world does not need the Church to repeat the world back to itself in religious language. If our morality merely baptises fashionable opinion, if our worship imitates secular entertainment, if our preaching carefully avoids whatever the age considers offensive, then the salt has lost precisely that savour for which Christ placed it in the world.
But Our Lord adds something equally necessary: “He that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Do and teach. Bernard’s credibility did not rest simply upon saying difficult things. A man who demands sacrifice of everybody except himself is not a prophet but a hypocrite. Bernard could preach renunciation because he had renounced. He could speak about prayer because he prayed. He could warn against luxury because he lived austerely. He could tell the mighty that earthly glory passes because he himself had deliberately abandoned the prospect of it. That is why holiness possesses an apologetic power which argument alone can never equal. The Catholic Faith becomes difficult to dismiss when one encounters somebody who has actually allowed it to make him different.
And today Bernard’s feast shines within the octave of the Assumption. The Blessed Virgin remains present in the prayers of the Mass; we invoke her who has passed from this earthly life and reigns in heavenly glory, asking that her intercession deliver us from the evils which beset us. How fitting for Bernard, whose love of Mary permeates his spirituality. His famous counsel is Respice stellam, voca Mariam — look to the Star; call upon Mary. A star matters when one is at sea. A star matters when the night is dark and the vessel has lost its bearings. Bernard knew perfectly well that the Christian life is a navigation through storms.
And why Mary? Because Mary is the perfect opposite of self-assertion. Bernard teaches us that holiness consists in being filled by God; Mary shows us a creature in whom God encountered no deliberate resistance. Ecce ancilla Domini. Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. In us, grace encounters barricades: pride, vanity, impurity, resentment, fear, self-will. In Mary there is consent. And because she empties herself of opposition to God, God fills her beyond every other creature. The feast of her Assumption tells us where such surrender ends: not in annihilation, but in glory. The world says that freedom means keeping oneself for oneself. Mary proves that the creature becomes most completely itself when it belongs completely to God.
That, finally, is why Bernard matters nine centuries after his death. Not because we wish sentimentally to recreate the twelfth century. Not because every judgement he made was infallible. Not because monks, crusades and medieval disputes can simply be transplanted into 2026. Bernard matters because human nature has not changed. We are still tempted by pride of intellect, addiction to influence, love of comfort, religious faction, imprudent zeal, fear of failure and the desire to reform everybody except ourselves. We still need what Bernard needed: repentance before judgement, contemplation before action, humility after failure, truth joined to charity, and love of God without measure.
Carissimi, perhaps the greatest crisis in the Church is always, finally, the crisis of saints. We have programmes, platforms, commissions, arguments, statements and strategies. But where are the souls who have allowed God to possess them? The Church does not principally require more men determined to make themselves heard. She requires men and women of whom today’s Introit can become true: the Lord filled him; therefore the Lord opened his mouth.
Let us therefore ask St Bernard not merely to make us admirers of Catholic Tradition, but saints formed by it. Let us ask for minds submissive to revealed Truth, hearts enlarged by charity, consciences purified by confession, tongues governed by wisdom, and courage freed from the need for human approval. And when we lose our bearings—as individuals, as families, or amid the storms that afflict the Church—let Bernard point once more beyond himself:
Respice stellam. Voca Mariam.
Look to the Star. Call upon Mary.
And Mary will do what she always does. She will lead us to her Son.
To Jesus Christ—honey to the mouth, music to the ear, joy to the heart; the Wisdom whom Bernard sought in silence, preached in the midst of the Church, loved without measure, and now possesses without end.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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