St William of Vercelli

William of Vercelli is one of the more restless founders. Born in Piedmont in 1085 and orphaned young, he leaves home at fourteen as a poor pilgrim to Compostela and begins a life marked by deliberate hardship. This life notes even the iron bands he has fastened around his body in addition to the ordinary miseries of travel. After time in Spain he reappears in southern Italy, first with a hermit, then in friendship with St John of Matera, and already acquiring a reputation as a wonder-worker after restoring sight to a blind man. His first intention is to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but when robbers attack him on the road he takes it as a sign that God wants another kind of labor from him. That labor becomes foundation after foundation. On Monte Vergine he first tries to live alone, but disciples gather around him. He organizes them, builds a church of Our Lady in 1124, and gives the mountain the name by which it is still known. It also shows the cost of such leadership. The rule is so austere, with no wine, meat, or dairy and with repeated fasting, that murmuring soon breaks out.

William does not force the unwilling. He appoints a prior and leaves, carrying the harder life elsewhere. The pattern repeats itself. He founds more communities, withdraws once they are stable, and begins again in another difficult place. That makes him unusual: he is a founder who repeatedly refuses to settle into being simply a governor. It also preserves the more public side of his holiness. King Roger II of Naples draws him to court, and jealous courtiers try to expose him as a fraud by sending a corrupt woman to tempt him. William answers by stretching himself unharmed upon burning coals and inviting her to lie beside him. The shock leads to her conversion and strengthens his standing with the king. He dies at Guglietto in 1142, leaving Monte Vergine as the one surviving house of his original foundations and a memory of penance, prayer, and repeated acts of beginning again.