Saint Peter of Tarentaise

The name belongs to three men. Fabio Arduino, writing for santiebeati.it, says three Savoyards called Peter of Tarentaise have been raised to the altars: Pope Innocent V, a Blessed, who reigned for four months in 1276, and two archbishops of Tarentaise, whose see was at Moûtiers. ³ Georges Goyau's article on the diocese in the Catholic Encyclopedia lists them too, with a third archbishop, Saint Peter III, who held the see from 1271 to 1283. ⁴ This is the second archbishop, Peter II. ³⁴

He was born in 1102 at Saint-Maurice-de-l'Exil, in the diocese of Vienne, not far from the Cistercian abbey of Bonnevaux. ³⁵ Arduino says he was a shepherd boy who was soon seen to be prodigiously gifted and learned the whole psalter by heart. ³ Butler, who drew his account from the Life written by Peter's companion Geoffrey, says "a strong inclination to learning, assisted by a good genius and a happy memory, carried him very successfully through his studies." ¹

At about twenty he entered Bonnevaux. ¹³ Butler says the abbey had lately been filled by a colony that Saint Bernard sent from Clairvaux; the Cistercian Order's own page calls it the seventh daughter house of Cîteaux, founded in 1117. ¹⁵ The monks there spent much of the day cutting wood and working the ground in silence, ate once a day, mostly coarse turnips, and slept four hours, rising at midnight for the night office. ¹

His family followed him. Butler says his parents, after four children, lived in continence and kept a house so full of poor guests and strangers that it was like a hospital. ¹ His father and two brothers entered Bonnevaux after him, and his mother and sister took the habit in a neighboring convent, which Arduino names as the abbey of Saint-Paul near Izeaux. ¹³

Butler tells the founding of Tamié through Amedeus, a kinsman of the emperor Conrad III, who entered Bonnevaux a year after Peter and asked for the lowest work in the house; his uncle once found him cleaning the monks' shoes. ¹ Amedeus built four monasteries, Butler says, among them Tamié, "in the desert mountains of the diocess of Tarentaise," and had his friend Peter, not yet thirty, made its first abbot in 1128. ¹

The other sources tell it differently. Goyau says Tamié was founded by Peter I, the archbishop before this Peter, "in a defile," "to serve as a shelter for pilgrims and travellers." ⁴ Arduino agrees, and dates Peter's appointment as first abbot to 1132. ³ The Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance says Tamié was founded in 1133 by monks from Bonnevaux, and lists Peter as its abbot from 1132 to 1141. ⁵

Butler says Peter, with the help of Amadeus III, Count of Savoy, set up a hospital at Tamié for the sick poor of the country and for strangers, and served in it himself. ¹

In 1142, by Butler's date, the count of Savoy had him elected archbishop of Tarentaise, and Saint Bernard and the general chapter of the order made him accept against his will. ¹ Goyau and the Cistercian page give the year as 1141. ⁴⁵ Butler says the diocese had been held by "a powerful ambitious wolf, named Idrael," whose deposition left it in ruin, its parish churches and tithes in lay hands. ¹

He kept his monastic life. Butler says he ate brown bread, herbs and pulse, which he shared with the poor, visited his diocese constantly, gave its parishes good priests, recovered the church revenues that laymen had seized, and reformed his cathedral chapter. ¹ Arduino says he did that with the help of canons regular and lived in common with them. ³ Butler adds that Geoffrey, who was with him through most of his years as bishop, credits him with many miracles, chiefly healings of the sick and the multiplying of food for the poor in hard times. ¹

In 1155, after thirteen years, he disappeared. ¹ Butler says he made his way to a Cistercian monastery in Germany where nobody knew him; Arduino names it as Lucelle, near Basel, where he meant to work in the fields as an ordinary monk. ¹³ A young man he had brought up recognized him among the monks going out to work, and he was taken home to his diocese. ¹

Butler says that for three months before each harvest, when food in the mountains ran short, he gave alms to all their people, and that twice in hard winters he was found to have given away the waistcoat off his back. ¹ He founded hospitals on the Alps "for the entertainment of poor travellers; because, before that time, many perished for the want of such a succour." ¹ Arduino says he worked to improve the shelter for travelers at the pass of the Little Saint Bernard, between Savoy and the Valley of Aosta. ³

Goyau says he founded the charity called the pain de Mai, the May bread, which "until the second half of the eighteenth century distributed bread at Moutiers at the expense of the archdiocese during the first twenty-eight days of May." ⁴ Arduino says it lasted until the French Revolution. ³

When the emperor Frederick I set up an antipope, Victor IV, against Pope Alexander III, Butler says Peter "was almost the only subject of the empire who had the courage openly to oppose his unjust attempt." ¹ He preached for Alexander in Alsace, Burgundy, Lorraine and much of Italy. ¹ Goyau says it was he who kept the seven hundred abbeys of the Cistercian Order in obedience to Alexander, and that in 1171 Alexander made the see of Tarentaise answerable only to Rome. ⁴

Near the end of his life the pope sent him to reconcile Louis VII of France and Henry II of England. ¹³ Butler tells how Henry came to meet him at Chaumont, got down from his horse and fell at his feet, and how, when the crowd took Peter's cloak to tear it into relics, the king kept it whole for himself. ¹ On Ash Wednesday of 1171, at the Cistercian abbey of Mortemer, Butler says, Henry and his whole court received ashes from him. ¹

He was sent again, to make peace between Henry and his son, and the journey failed. ¹ He fell ill on the way home and died at Bellevaux, a Cistercian abbey in the diocese of Besançon, in 1174, at seventy-three. ¹ Arduino gives the day as September 14 and says he was buried in the abbey church. ³ Pope Celestine III canonized him in 1191. ¹³ The Cistercians count him the second monk of their order to be officially canonized. ⁵

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Peter of Tarentaise, and none is given here. ¹³⁴

Saint Peter of Tarentaise's feast is September 14, the day he died in 1174. The current Roman Martyrology lists him on that day, as a Cistercian abbot who governed the see of Moûtiers "with ardent zeal" and worked for concord among peoples (the quotation is translated from the Italian). ² Santiebeati.it keeps him on September 14 too. ³ Butler gives his life under May 8, and Arduino says the Diocese of Aosta keeps his memory on May 6. ¹³

He became a bishop because his order told him to, and once, after thirteen years, he ran away from it to be an ordinary monk again. ¹³ He was brought back by a boy who recognized him in a line of monks going out to work. ¹

Most of what is remembered of him is bread: the turnips of Bonnevaux, the brown bread he shared at his own table, the alms before harvest, and a May charity that outlived him by six hundred years. ¹³⁴

He was also unafraid of an emperor. Butler says he stood almost alone in the empire for the lawful pope, and that Frederick, who banished others, "stood in awe of his sanctity." ¹

He died on the road, coming back from a peace that did not hold. ¹ The Martyrology remembers him for the work, not the result. ²