Saint Gerard of Macon

Saint Gérard, under the miter, shone so brightly through his knowledge and virtues that he was the arbiter and light of the clergy, both secular and regular. In 915, he attended the council held at Chalon-sur-Saône, where the prelates who composed it addressed many matters concerning the spiritual and temporal well-being of the churches in their province; but the main purpose of their meeting, as almost all historians of Burgundy state, was to force, by way of excommunication, Racalfe, Count of Mâco Racalfe, comte de Mâcon Count of Mâcon who usurped ecclesiastical property. n, to restore the property of the church of Saint-Vincent, which he had seized by violence, abusing the excessive kindness of the holy bishop. Racalfe did not think he should wait for the sentence; he returned the lands he had appropriated. Gérard was not as fortunate with Hu gh II, Lord of Bâgé. Th Hugues II, sire de Bâgé Local lord in a territorial conflict with Bishop Gerard. is lord had usurped several possessions from the church of Mâcon, among others the town of Saint-Laurent on the left bank of the Saône. The bishop sent troops to recover his property, but Hugh repelled them and left Gérard only the city of Mâcon. God, it seems, arranged this defeat for His true servant to make his resignation and selflessness shine all the more; he never complained about these acts of violence, and if he tried to repel them, the interest of the Church was the sole motive for his actions. The setbacks that this holy bishop experienced while doing good, and his desire to live in solitude, disgusted him with the world and led him to resolve to leave his bishopric to retire to the solitude of Brou in Bresse, six leagues from Mâcon.

A few words on this locality, which became so famous for the residence of Saint Gerar Gérard Twenty-fifth bishop of Mâcon and founder of the monastery of Brou. d and for the beautiful monument that Margaret of Austria later had erected there, cannot seem out of place here. The oldest documents on Brou o nly Brou A location in France possessing a relic of the saint. begin its history in 927. We owe them to Fustaillier and Bugnion, who report that in that same year, Gerard, the twenty-fifth bishop of Mâcon, abdicated his see to no longer concern himself with the earth, and that he retired to the solitude of Brou, where he vowed to spend the rest of his life. Here is the text found in the chronicle of Fustaillier: Brovii saltum prope Tani oppidum, cui Burgo nunc nomen est, canobium cuius construxit, in quo usque ad vitae exitum pientissime vixit. — "Gerard retired to the forest of Brou, near the town of Tanus or Tanum, whose name is today Bourg, etc." A dissertation by M. Thoma Bourg City near Brou, identified with the ancient Tanus. s Riboud on the ancient and modern monuments of Brou proves that this forest had grown over the ruins of a considerable agglomeration of houses, which he suspects were destroyed by the Burgundians, who seized the provinces of eastern France and sacked them toward the beginning of the 6th century, or perhaps fifty years later, when the ferocious Attila made his incursion into Gaul. Medals, works of copper, bronze, and iron, utensils, household statues, fragments of pottery, vases, urns, lamps, lacrymatories, metal keys, rings, and other jewelry, a compact layer of ashes, a thick and continuous bed of Roman tile debris that surmounts it, and a host of curious objects, sometimes mixed with human bones; such are the monuments that have been discovered by excavating the soil of Brou and its surroundings, and which prove better than volumes of titles would that this place was the seat of a considerable gathering of dwellings, perhaps of the ancient city of Tanus or Tanum. Saint Gerard undoubtedly did not know that before being crowned with majestic oaks, witnesses to his meditations and his sacrifice, this place had once been occupied by gathered dwellings, and that men in society had existed and disappeared there. His presence, by reviving religion in this desert, had soon restored to it a part of its ancient splendor. The work of Christianity is to spread life wherever it establishes its empire. The brilliance cast by the virtues of Saint Gerard in the desert of Brou attracted such a great number of companions around him that he was obliged to build a church and a monastery there, where he lived in the practice of all virtues, and where, according to Fustaillier and several other writers, he died in 958 in the odor of great sanctity.

There has long been debate, and there still is, regarding the burial place of Saint Gérard; but according to numerous historians and various martyrologies, notably that of Hugues Ménard, which we have consulted, it seems certain that his body rested for several years in the monastery of Brou, but that it was subsequently transported to the church of the religious of Saint-Pierre of Mâcon. The cause and date of this translation are unknown. In 1569, says Abbot Agu in his History of the Last Revolutions of Mâcon, the Protestants pulled the relics of Saint Gérard from the tomb where they rested and threw them into a well, mixed with animal bones. Subsequently, a stone cross was erected on this site, which was called the cross of Saint Gérard, and which was torn down by the revolutionaries in November 1793.

The death of the holy bishop only added to the fame that his virtues had already brought to the monastery of Brou. Crowds of people went there in devotion; they came from very far away to invoke his power in heaven, and the prayers of the intercessors, often granted, caused the reputation of the holy founder to grow. His memory was still alive in these places when Margaret of Bourbon trembled for the life of Duke Philip, her husband. Let us recall the facts; they are interesting.

In 1480, Philip II, Prince of Savoy, who, like his predecessors, often came to live at the castle of Pont-d'Ain, whose picturesque and healthy location on the banks of the Ain made this stay pleasant, had a fall from his horse while hunting near Lagnieu and broke his arm. This accident had dangerous consequences; Margaret of Bourbon, his wife, deeply alarmed and fearing for the Duke's life, made a solemn vow to build a church and a monastery at Brou on the site of that of Saint Gérard, if the prince were restored to her. Heaven was favorable to her, but the death of this princess, which occurred in 1483, did not allow her to fulfill her commitment. Philip took it upon himself to execute the vow that this dear wife had made to obtain his recovery; he was about to set to work when he died in Chambéry on November 7, 1497. Before breathing his last, he urgently recommended to Philibert II, his son and successor, to replace him in this pious duty. Philibert, nicknamed the Fair, was married to Margaret of Austria, daughter of Emperor Maximilian. To the charms of beau Marguerite d'Autriche Queen of Spain, mother of Philip IV, who wished to meet the saint. ty, this princess added those of a noble and gentle character, a tender and pious heart, and a lively and amiable spirit. Death, which from Margaret's cradle had been attached to destroying the objects of her affections, cruel death did not delay in breaking the bonds of such a perfect union. Philibert, hunting in the very place where his father had broken his arm, stopped, being hot, at the edge of a fountain near the village of Saint-Valbas; pleurisy seized him, and a few days later he died at Pont-d'Ain on September 10, 1504, aged only twenty-four. Nothing on earth was capable of consoling Margaret; she directed her sad gaze toward heaven, and, faithful to her great character, she had only two thoughts left: to help the unfortunate and to carry out the vow of Margaret, her mother-in-law. She called to Brou the most famous artists from France, Italy, Flanders, and Germany. The first stone was laid on January 2, 1507. From then on, the brush animated the glass, the axe shaped the wood, the chisel made the marble breathe, the hammer bent the iron into a thousand ornaments, the mold gave form to the clay, the stereotomy regularized the raw rock; and in less than thirty years, in the heart of a fertile and smiling region, rose one of the temples richest in architectural details that exists in France. Margaret placed it under the patronage of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, to whom she had a particular devotion.

A vast and convenient convent was built upon that of Saint-Gérard, of which vestiges can still be seen in the corridor that exists between the current seminary and the church. Margaret established Augustinian religio religieux augustins Religious order serving the church of Neubourg. us there whom she brought from Lombardy. They were replaced by the Augustinians expelled from France in 1659. The work of Margaret of Austria, barely completed, ran the greatest dangers when the troops of Francis I, King of France, seized Bresse and Bugey in 1535. Duke Emmanuel Philibert, seeking to recover Bresse, sent an army there in 1557 under the orders of Polvilliers, who laid siege to Bourg. The church of Brou suffered greatly; part of the convent was burned, and the damages were not completely repaired until many years later.

When Henry IV made the second conquest of Bresse from the Duke of Savoy in 1600, the operations and movements of Marshal de Biron's army and the long siege of the citadel of Bourg caused great damage to the buildings of Brou. The revolutionary era, particularly fatal to the clergy whose property was declared state property, would likely have been the time of the decay and ruin of Brou had the departmental administration not succeeded in including this edifice in the class of national monuments to be preserved at the state's expense. This safeguard did not, however, prevent irreparable depredations and removals. The church was in particular danger when revolutionary fervor turned against coats of arms and heraldic symbols: a troop of Vandals went there; fortunately, the administration had had the doors closed. The assailants, unable to enter, unleashed their brutal fury on the ornaments decorating the frontispiece. Another crisis followed that one; but what was to cause the ruin of this monument was precisely what saved it: an army corps was being formed in Bourg under the name of the Army of the Alps; for lack of sufficient space to store the fodder necessary for the cavalry, the church of Brou was invaded for this use. The nave and the side aisles were filled to the rafters; thus, the mausoleums and all the precious objects, defended by impenetrable masses, were sheltered from any harm. The invasion of foreign troops in 1814 and 1815 caused fear for the church and its monuments, but it is fair to say that the Austrian corps that occupied Bourg showed only admiration for a masterpiece owed to the magnificence of a princess of their own nation.

As for the monastery, it underwent many phases from 1792 to the present day. Initially, under the pretext that the decree declaring Brou a national monument named only the church, the Duke's agents made repeated attempts to sell the convent buildings. The efforts of the administrators of Bourg prevented them from ever succeeding in their project, and this house, under the Empire and the Restoration, was alternately a cavalry barracks, a mendicity depot, and an asylum for the insane; but finally, the bishopric of Belley having been re-established by the Concordat of 1817, and Brou being located within the new jurisdiction of this ancient see, the General Council of the Ain department, in its session of June 6, 1823, ceded the buildings and the church of Brou to Bishop Devie, Bis hop of Be Mgr Devie 19th-century Bishop of Belley who restored the cult. lley, to establish his major seminary there, which was installed on November 11 of the same year. Bishop Devie hastened to place under the patronage of Saint Gerard the chapel he had prepared in the apartments of Margaret of Austria, which are attached to the seminary and serve as a palace for the bishops of Belley during their stay in Bresse. The zealous prelate established the feast of Saint Gerard in his diocese, and his office can be seen indicated in the calendar inserted in the third volume of the *Rituel de Belley*, printed in 1830.

have preserved for the patron of Brou a portion of the devotion of their former sovereign. — See the life of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, or rather of Tolentino, on September 10.