MIRACULOUS MIRACLES™

Saint — Bl. Pope Urban II

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Bl. Pope Urban II
c. 1042 AD, Lagery, Champagne (noble Champenois French family) — July 29, 1099 AD, Rome
159th Pope (1088–1099); preacher of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont (1095)
St. Peter's Basilica, Rome — tomb in the Vatican grottoes; also the Cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand, France — the site of the Council of Clermont (November 27, 1095) where Urban II preached the First Crusade, Vatican City
Feast
July 29
Canonized
Beatified July 14, 1881 by Pope Leo XIII
Life

Odo of Châtillon — born around 1042 to a noble Champenois French family at Lagery — was educated at the cathedral school of Reims under St. Bruno of Cologne (the future founder of the Carthusian Order in 1084). Around 1070, he entered the Abbey of Cluny under Abbot St. Hugh of Cluny (the principal Cluniac abbot of the High Medieval period, abbot 1049–1109).

Pope Gregory VII summoned him to Rome around 1078 and created him Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia. He served as papal legate to Germany (1084–1085) during the Investiture Controversy.

After the brief pontificate of Bl. Victor III (Desiderius of Monte Cassino) of 1086–1087, Odo was elected Pope on March 12, 1088 at the Norman-controlled Terracina (Rome was still occupied by the antipope Clement III, Wibert of Ravenna), taking the name Urban II.

His eleven-year pontificate (1088–1099) consolidated the Gregorian Reform programme and undertook the systematic Catholic reform of the European clergy and monastic communities. He chaired the councils of Melfi (1089), Piacenza (March 1095), and Clermont (November 1095) — the principal late-11th-century reforming councils.

At the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095, Urban II preached the sermon — to the assembled French Catholic episcopate and the French Catholic nobility and faithful — that launched the First Crusade. The sermon responded to the appeal of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos for military aid against the Seljuk Turkish advance, calling on the Catholic faithful of Western Europe to take up the Cross (accept the crusader's vow), travel to Jerusalem, and liberate the Holy Sepulchre from Muslim control. The famous response — 'Deus vult!' ('God wills it!') — of the assembled crowd at Clermont became the rallying-cry of the entire Crusader movement.

Urban II promised the complete indulgence of temporal sin to the Crusaders (one of the principal medieval institutional uses of the indulgence-tradition), instituted the Crusader sermon-and-vow procedure, and organized the diplomatic-logistical apparatus of the First Crusade.

The First Crusade departed in waves from France, Italy, Germany, and the Norman territories in August 1096 — and captured Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, after the three-year campaign. Urban II died fourteen days later on July 29, 1099, before the news of the Crusader capture of Jerusalem could reach Rome.

Beatified by Pope Leo XIII on July 14, 1881, Urban II is venerated as one of the principal medieval reforming popes and the principal historical-papal patron of the entire Crusading movement.

Miracles & Phenomena

  • The preaching of the First Crusade at Clermont (November 27, 1095)

    Urban II's sermon at the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095 — launching the First Crusade in response to the Byzantine imperial appeal for military aid against the Seljuk Turkish advance — is one of the single most institutionally consequential public speeches in medieval European history. The consequences — the two-century medieval Crusading movement, the Catholic-Byzantine military-political interaction, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291), the medieval indulgence-and-crusader-vow institutional tradition, the mutual Catholic-Islamic civilizational contact in the medieval Mediterranean, the High Medieval European political-religious-cultural development — flow from the Clermont sermon of November 27, 1095.

  • The Catholic Reconquista and Iberian Catholic recovery

    Although the principal Urban II Crusading effort was directed at the Holy Land, the pope also supported the Iberian Catholic Reconquista — promising equivalent crusader-indulgences to the Spanish-Portuguese Catholic warriors fighting against the Moorish-Andalusian Muslim states. The Urban-II Iberian Reconquista support accelerated the Catholic recovery of Toledo (1085, under his immediate predecessor Gregory VII), Valencia (1094, the famous Reconquista campaign of El Cid Ruy Díaz de Vivar), and the High Medieval Reconquista campaigns that would culminate in the Catholic recovery of Granada in 1492.

Relics
  • Body
    Tomb of Bl. Pope Urban II
    Vatican grottoes, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome

    Buried in St. Peter's; remains in the Vatican necropolis. The Cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand (rebuilt in the Gothic style 1248–1295 over the Romanesque cathedral where Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095) survives in active Catholic liturgical use as the principal Crusader-historical pilgrim destination in France.

Iconography
  • Urban II preaching the First Crusade at Clermont (November 27, 1095)

    The late-11th-century Roman pope in papal vestments on the stage of the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095 proclaiming the First Crusade, the assembled French Catholic episcopate and the French Catholic nobility responding with the famous cry 'Deus vult!' ('God wills it!'), the Crusader-cross visible on the pope's vestments and on the shoulders of the kneeling crusader-knights — the standard iconography of the First Crusade preaching, reproduced in medieval and early-modern Catholic art.

Patronages
Catholic Crusader tradition (the principal historical-papal patron of the entire medieval Crusading movement)Catholic Cluniac-papal reform tradition (he was a Cluniac monk before his papal election)The French Catholic Champenois region (Lagery, Châtillon-sur-Marne, Reims)
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