St. Gerard of Brogne

St. Gerard of Brogne (c. 895 – 3 October 959) was a nobleman of the region of Namur, in present-day Belgium, who served for a time as a soldier and courtier before turning wholly to God. On land belonging to his family at Brogne he founded a monastery around 919 and, after spending years as a monk at Saint-Denis near Paris to be trained in the observant Benedictine life, returned to govern it as abbot.

His reputation for holiness and sound discipline led princes and bishops to entrust him with the reform of monasteries throughout Lotharingia and Flanders, and he became one of the great figures of the tenth-century monastic revival in the Low Countries, alongside the reforms of Cluny and Gorze, restoring the strict Rule of St. Benedict to numerous decayed houses. Humble and austere, he returned in his last years to the quiet of Brogne, where he died. He is venerated as a saint and a father of monastic reform.