St. Norbert

Norbert is one of those saints whose whole direction changes in a moment and then never turns back. Born into noble surroundings and holding church benefices while still living the easy life of a court cleric, he was shaken into conversion by the thunderstorm in which his horse threw him and he heard inwardly the call to turn from evil and do good. The severe aftermath of that awakening followed: prayer, retreat, ordination, public renunciation of luxury, selling his estates, giving what he could to the poor, and setting out barefoot to obtain papal permission to preach. His early apostolic years were hard and not especially smooth. He was denounced as an innovator, traveled in poverty, and won followers only gradually. But the work clarified when he received the lonely valley of Premontre and gathered there the first white-robed canons who would become the Premonstratensian order.

Norbert was not simply founding another cloister for escape from the world. He was reforming the life of canons, combining common observance, poverty, preaching, and pastoral usefulness. The second half of his life is equally large. Against his own wishes he was made archbishop of Magdeburg, entered the city like a beggar, and then governed with a firmness that made him hated by those who had grown comfortable with laxity or with stolen church property. In the great schism around Innocent II, Norbert helped win imperial support for the true pope. By the time he died in 1134, worn out after twenty crowded years of work, he had been courtier, penitent, preacher, founder, reformer, bishop, and defender of the Church.