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Catholic Saints
St. Norbert
00:16:47
In this episode of Catholic Saints, Dr. Elizabeth Klein sits down with Dr. James Prothro to discuss the life and legacy of Saint Norbert. The conversion journey of this great saint began with a fall from a horse during a tumultuous storm. Find out more about his life and the Norbertine order and discover what he can teach us today. Dr. James Prothro is an associate professor of Theology at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. Learn more at Augustine.edu.
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.
- [00:21]
B
Hello and welcome to Catholic Saints, the podcast about the lives of the saints and their legacy for the church and for us. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Klein and I'm joined today by Dr. Jim Prothero to talk about St. Norbert. Welcome, Dr. Prothero.
- [00:35]
A
All right, thank you very much, Dr. Klein, for having me.
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B
I like to usually start things off by asking our professors something about their day to day theological business. Dr. Prothero is a Lutheran convert and like many converts, is very interested in the doctrine of justification by faith. And he's about to teach a class on that topic. And so I thought I would give him the opportunity to say, like, what's your one best tip? One most important thing that Catholics should think about when they're approaching this doctrine or trying to understand what Paul has to say.
- [01:05]
A
Oh my gosh, there's just one. I mean, there's a lot of important ones from different angles. I mean, I suppose one thing that's really key that I try to impress the students sometimes they come to Paul's letters and they read Paul and they see him saying that a person is justified by faith and not by works of the law. And then they get really nervous and they're like, oh no, Paul must be Protestant. And so they kind of like the knee jerk reaction is, but the tradition can help correct things that are wrong from the early times. And so we'll just listen to James or we'll listen to like later popes or whatever, right? Or later theologians. And so I don't really have to listen to that part of Paul because he was sort of mistaken or if he's not mistaken, I can't really see it correctly. But up into the Council of Trent and then further on, faith is our existence as children of God. Pope Francis called faith filial existence. Right? Existence as children. It's how we come to God humbly as his kids and receive his mercy. How we receive Christ and saints from the beginning, including Paul and then moving on into St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent. You can say that a person is justified by faith, right? The difference between us and others would be that we won't say faith alone. And when we say faith, we don't just mean I said one prayer one time at Christian camp and so now I'm saved, right? Because I said I believe, right? I made one act of faith. It's a life of faith, of receiving the Lord. Right of faith is receptive, and then it's also active because we receive Him. And then if you believe in him enough to believe what he says, then you're also going to do what he says and live like what he tells you is true. Right. And that includes his commands. So you don't have to be a Catholic who says, not faith. We believe in justification by works, because that's not true. We believe in justification by faith that works.
- [03:18]
B
So your hot tip is listen to Paul.
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A
Yeah, listen to Paul and read all of Paul because you'll get to some of those passages where he's talking about conversion, Right. Where he is so insistent on faith, and you'll go, oh, man, it sounds Protestant. Cause those are the passages that they're reading. But then keep reading.
- [03:36]
B
Listen to Paul. Don't panic.
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A
Yeah, don't panic.
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B
This is Dr. Prothero's hot tip for justification by faith.
- [03:42]
A
Yeah. And then keep reading because he's gonna say lots of other things about salvation that will involve your works and your activities and everything like that.
- [03:49]
B
Yeah, wonderful. So today we're talking about St. Norbert, whose feast day is the 6th of June. I asked Dr. Prothro to join me about St. Norbert because he attends St. Norbert's parish, which is the closest parish to our new location in St. Louis, the Augustine Institute's new location. I don't know anything about St. Norbert other than the Norbertin. And also, it's not a surprise to listeners to this podcast that I have the open agenda of putting new baby names on the table by doing the saints podcast. And I think that Norbert is a cool name, but I would like. Dr. Prather, just give us sort of some basic biographical information about St. Norbert.
- [04:26]
A
Absolutely. So St. Norbert was born in Zanten, or Ksanten. It's X, A, N, T, E, N, which is in western Germany. Right. Northwestern Germany in the late 1000s to the year 1134. So way back in the day and his early life, he's ordained a sub deacon, but he's kind of reluctant to go any further than that. And he's sort of reluctant to have more than his office. So he has, like, a general piety, but very, very general. Right. He sort of like, believes in God. His job is to be a subdeacon, but he's not really. He's certainly not on fire or anything like that. And then he has an experience where he. His horse bucks and is scared by some lightning In a storm and he falls off and he goes, I need to change my life.
- [05:16]
B
What's with these Germans? Germans in conversion by storms.
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A
I know, yeah. Luther is in a lightning storm and then vows to become a monk. And then, you know, that was the beginning of the end there. That's a good connection.
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B
God's going to turn us away. But he's got the horse from Paul. But it's like Hermione Paul, so there's lightning involved.
- [05:34]
A
Yeah, that's right. Although there's no horse in Paul in the Bible. That's just in paintings.
- [05:39]
B
Okay, okay, okay. So he's kind of got a sort of lukewarm, administrative, low level clarity, but then has this deeper conversion.
- [05:47]
A
That's right, it's this deeper conversion and kind of takes on a strict personal discipline for himself. And at the beginning he starts sharing this with other people and they're not 1000% excited about it. But then there's some people who join him and become kind of like many disciples. But the discipline that he has, especially in his asceticism, like his fasting and things like that, is too much for people. And some people. It's reported that in connection with this discipline, like die like three people. So it was pretty intense.
- [06:23]
B
So like white martyrdom turned red martyrdom.
- [06:25]
A
Yeah, that's right. So he obviously gets treated with suspicion after that. So what he does is he sells his property and then the Pope allows him to just become an itinerant preacher. So he does that. Right. So he sells all his stuff and he just starts being a wandering people.
- [06:43]
B
So is him selling all his stuff? Is that kind of like a penitential for. Or like he's trying to kind of divest himself so people won't follow him. Or does we know?
- [06:56]
A
I don't know. We might know. I don't know is a problem. I'm not a real expert in St. Norbert. I'm not even the beginning of an expert in St. Norbert, but I don't know. But what it does is it marks a sort of departure from.
- [07:13]
B
Okay. From his, like early.
- [07:15]
A
Yeah, from his early zeal as a priest there to sort of. To go out. Right. And it's great. I mean, it's something to pick up from him. Right. That he is. He doesn't just stand there and say, no, everybody needs to get on board with like my way of life and my way of doing it. Come on. He goes, okay, I'm going to get out of town and I'm going to go do this sort of on My own.
- [07:40]
B
Do something different.
- [07:41]
A
Yeah, do something different. So he doesn't give up his faith, Right. He doesn't give up his ministry, but he changes it. Right, because it's not working for the people. And you'll see that that's a main thread in St. Norbert's life and spirituality, right, Is serving the people. So he still has this personal desire for reform among the clergy. So he's traveling around. When he's traveling around, he just runs into more and more priests who have kind of low morale. Right. They're sort of despondent about things. Right. Their life is ho hum. There may be absentee from their parishes. Right. Things like that. So low morale, but then also low morality, both of those combined. And that's just kind of the situation that he sees. So he's got a desire for personal reform, but as he goes around preaching, he still wants some church reform. He wants the clergy to be called to something better. And in 11:19 he gets his chance because Pope Calixus II asks him to found a religious order in France. He's been traveling around mostly like Belgium and western Germany and places like that, a little bit of France. And so they end up building on land in a valley called Premontre. And then his order ends up being called the Primonstratensians, but usually.
- [09:05]
B
Which we now logically call the Norbertines.
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A
Yeah, you just usually just call them the Norbertines. And he uses The Rule of St. Augustine, right. As his base. And then he adds a little bit of spirituality from the Franciscans because he's friends with St. Bernard and some other people. But then he goes on. So the order starts to grow and grow and grow after his death. By the 1300s, there's like a thousand abbeys that have sprung up in different places. So it's growing during his lifetime. But then he's appointed Archbishop of Magdeburg in Germany in 1126, and he tried to reform the clergy there to a stricter way of life and they weren't having it. There were even assassination attempts on the man.
- [09:52]
B
This happens. It's like John Chrysostom.
- [09:54]
A
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
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B
He's running the town when he goes after the clergy.
- [09:57]
A
That's right. He was involved in a controversy where there was an anti Pope, where you have Innocent II was elected Pope and somebody else rebelled and St. Norbert became an advisor to the Holy Roman Emperor and kind of persuaded him to help the real Pope to get him back on. Ultimately, he ended up dying in 1134. And he was canonized in the 1500s.
- [10:20]
B
Okay, so monastic reformer, clerical reformer. This is a pretty common thread in the 12th century. We recently recorded a podcast on Bernard of Clairvaux, who also has a lot of similar sort of life stories. And this also, this, obviously, this great need for the reform of the monastic life in this time, you just have these orders just explode, which I always think is a bit of a. Just a hopeful or interesting sign for our own times. But maybe we also feel like things are not going in the right direction, or people don't have the zeal that they ought to. And, you know, something comes along and people are really able to sort of express that, and it really sort of grows quickly. So in terms of St. Norbert or the Norbertines, what sort of Legacy maybe does St. Norbert leave for the church? Or do you have any thoughts about that?
- [11:01]
A
Yeah, so it's the kind of positioning of the Norbertine orders that is most impressive to me for this. So in contrast to. So he's. So it's like I said, it's based on St. Augustine's rule. He adds in some Franciscan spiritualities to it as well. Their way of life, their kind of way of being. There's male and female Norbertine canons and canonesses, but the canons aren't cloistered monks. They live under a rule together in an abbey. But the lay brothers and the priests who are there work especially in nearby parishes and serve the needs of the local church. So what Norbertines do. St. Norbert doesn't set it up with like, okay, the one thing that's needed that we will be good at is as follows. And we will be good at it everywhere. And other orders can do other sorts of. Of things. They don't have a single specialty like that. I mean, they're into, like, the standard things, right? Poverty, chastity, obedience. They're into service and preaching. They're into helping the poor. But he wants, on the one hand, he wants the priest to be able to be nourished by community, right? And having an abbey to be able to come back to a kind of haven't. To pray together, to live together in poverty. But each abbey is autonomous and set up that way on purpose so that they can sort of do and morph to whatever it is the local church needs. Right? The main. The thing of the Norbertines is service to the local church.
- [12:37]
B
That's really interesting. I mean, that really is certainly Augustinian, because those of you who may know some of the details of St. Augustine's life, he intended to be a monk, not a priest. He's force ordained priest, as they did in the early Church, but he still really wants to live the monastic life and be able to serve the people sort of from that grounded community. So he ends up having a monastic community sort of attached to his, you know, well, parish is, you know, the seat of the hippo, but that, but that's sort of similar. And it's also really interesting that St. Norbert himself was sort of a disaffected cleric who was converted to a deeper way of life, sees a lot of other disaffected clerics and says, like, look, people, in order to serve the lady, well, you need a community to sort of keep you fed, keep, you know, you grounded so that you have. Have to give to others. That seems like a really applicable lesson, whatever your state of life, that you have to sort of you. You can't give what you don't have. So you have to make sure that your own life is sort of nourished by community and prayer if you want to be able to serve the greater communities and the greater prayer life of sort of those around you.
- [13:41]
A
Yeah, that's right. And the fact that the rule is kind of flexible. Right. Contrast that with his early zeal. Right. With heavy. So it's not as though he ever loses an interest in discipline and seriousness, but the desire to serve and then the recognition that, you know, like certain our own lives, like personally, it might just be you at your church and you're like, this is the one thing that I'm really into and everybody else ought to be into it because it's important. But maybe sometimes that's not the first thing that needs to happen. Or maybe it is important, but it's not actually going to work here the same way that you want it to be. But what can you do? How can you engage to be able to strengthen the witness to the Lord,
- [14:27]
B
this intensity that he has, which is this is. This is a common story in the saints, right? That their intensity is. It's too much. You know, like St. Benedict almost gets poisoned by his first monks because he's too strict. But then how. You know, obviously we're attracted to the intense intensity of saints and their great love for the Lord and their great acts of fasting. But then how can they sort of prayerfully channel that interior intensity, their personal devotion, in a way that's sort of helpful to those around them all right? While St. Norbert. Do you have some sort of maybe takeaways for listeners thoughts for, you know, maybe they can take away to prayer, ask for Norbert's intercession, that kind of thing.
- [15:09]
A
Yeah, I've been asking. I mean, it fits because I go to St. Norbert's parish, right. But asking St. Norbert particularly for his intercession for my parish, and I think whatever parish you're at, that's the kind of thing that he would love to hear.
- [15:24]
B
Right. So like renewal of parish and sort of also, it seems to me maybe he's a good patron for the renewal of relationship between the laity and the clergy. And he experienced a lot of disaffected clerics, clerics who weren't behaving as they ought. This is something that might sound familiar to modern Catholics. And so sort of just the chance for the lady again to turn to their fathers and their fathers to turn to them in a sort of a natural way, which involves also penance and involves, you know, he gave away everything to the poor as sort of an authentic witness to the people. So that's, that's great. So thank you so much for helping me learn more about St. Norbert and
- [16:02]
A
thank you very much.
- [16:03]
B
St. Norbert, pray for us.
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A
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