Benno

Saint Benno of Meissen
300px Painting by Johann Michael Rottmayr, 1702 Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Confessor and Bishop of Meissen
Born	c. 1010 Hildesheim, Duchy of Saxony
Died	16 June 1106(1106-06-16) Meissen, Margraviate of Meissen
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church
Canonized	31 May 1523 by Pope Adrian VI
Major shrine	Munich, formerly Meissen
Feast	16 June
Attributes	book, fish with keys in its mouth
Patronage	fishermen, weavers, Dresden-Meissen, Munich

This article is about St Benno, Bishop of Meissen. For the other German St Benno, see Benno II of Osnabrück. For the Italian bishop also known as Benno, see Beno of Santi Martino e Silvestro.

Saint Benno (c. 1010 – 16 June 1106) was Bishop of Meissen from 1066 until his death. Venerated since the 13th century, he was canonized in 1523.

Life

Little is known of Benno's early life. Born in Hildesheim, it is unlikely that he was the scion of a Saxon noble family, such as the Woldenburgs; it is also unlikely that in his youth he entered and was educated at the monastery of St. Michael in Hildesheim, despite the claims of later hagiographers. More likely, Benno was a canon of the Goslar chapter. He became a monk in 1028 and was ordained in 1040. In 1066 he was nominated by King Henry IV to the episcopal see of Meissen.

Benno appears as a supporter of the Saxon Rebellion in 1073, though the chronicler Lambert of Hersfeld and other contemporary authorities attribute little weight to his share in it. Henry IV imprisoned Benno, however, but released him soonafter on his taking an oath of fidelity, which he did not keep. In the fierce Investiture Controversy, he appeared again in the ranks of the king's enemies and allegedly took part in the election of antiking Rudolf of Rheinfelden in 1077. After Rudolf's death he turned to the new antiking Hermann of Salm and was accordingly excommunicated and deprived of his bishopric by the 1085 Synod of Mainz. Benno betook himself to Archbishop Guibert of Ravenna, supported by Henry as Antipope Clement III, and by a penitent acknowledgment of his offenses obtained from him both absolution and a letter of commendation to Henry, on the basis of which he was restored to his see.

Benno promised, apparently, to use his influence for peace with the Saxons, but again failed to keep his promise, returning in 1097 to the papal party and recognizing Urban II as the rightful pope. With this he disappears from authentic history; there is no evidence to support the later stories of his missionary activity and zeal for church-building and for ecclesiastical music. Benno died of natural causes on June 16, 1106.

Veneration

File:Benno of Meissen.jpg

St Benno depicted with a fish in hand, two keys between its gills (stained glass from the Church of Saint Benno in Munich)

Benno did much for his diocese, both by ecclesiastical reforms on the Hildebrandine model and by material developments. Benno enjoyed veneration in his native Saxony throughout the later Middle Ages. The canons of Meissen and George, the duke of Albertine Saxony, coordinated a campaign to achieve Benno's canonization in the last years of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century. The canons sought the prestige of a canonized local bishop, and the duke sought a suitable model bishop for the reform of the church. Adrian VI issued the bull of canonization in 1523. Although Benno's sainthood had little to do with Luther's call for reform, once canonized he became a symbol for both sides of the reforming debate: Luther reviled him in early tracts against the cult of the saints. Catholic reformers turned him into a model of orthodoxy; and after Protestant mobs desecrated Benno's tomb in Meissen in 1539, the Wittelsbach dynasty ultimately made him patron saint of Munich and Old Bavaria.

For his part, the English Protestant John Foxe eagerly repeated the charges which Benno made against Gregory VII during the Investiture Controversy, such as necromancy, torture of a former friend upon a bed of nails, commissioning an attempted assassination, executions without trials, unjust excommunication, doubting the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and even burning it.

Benno's feast day is 16 June. He is the patron-saint of anglers and weavers. His iconographic figures include a fish with keys in its mouth and a book. The reason for the fish is a legend that upon the excommunication of Henry IV the bishop told his canons to throw the keys to the cathedral into the Elbe; later a fisherman found the keys in a fish and brought them to the bishop.

Sources

• David Collins SJ: Reforming Saints. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. pp. 3–6, 28-39, 45-46.
• Christoph Volkmar: Die Heiligenerhebung Bennos von Meißen (1523/24). Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit, landesherrliche Kirchenpolitik und reformatorische Kritik im albertinischen Sachsen in der frühen Reformationszeit (Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte; 146), Münster 2002.
• David Collins SJ: "Bursfelders, Humanists, and the Rhetoric of Sainthood: The Late Medieval vitae of Saint Benno". Revue Benedictine 111 (2001): 508-556.
• Philip M. Soergel: Wondrous in his Saints (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 181-191.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 
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External links

• Saint Benno at the Christian Iconography web site.