Man on Fire: The Life and Spirit of Norbert of Xanten

Man on Fire: The Life and Spirit of Norbert of Xanten

Norbert of Xanten lived in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and he was an early and headstrong Church reformer. He was also a nobleman, a courtier, a priest, an ascetic, an itinerant preacher, an archbishop, a defender of papal authority and of the sacrament of the Eucharist, a legendary peacemaker and an exemplar of the apostolic way of life. In addition, in the remote woods of northeast France, Norbert would found one of the great clerical orders of the Church—one that has endured, despite wars, plagues, famines, the Protestant Reformation, Napoleonic suppression, Nazism, fascism, communism and Church politics, through nine long centuries to our present time.Put another way, Norbert led one of the most remarkable lives of saints before or since.Still, few American Catholics know St. Norbert or the order he established in Prémontré and still active and relevant 900 years later. This lack of familiarity owes primarily to the fact that for most of their history the Norbertines operated almost exclusively in Europe and have had a much smaller footprint in North America than their Jesuit, Benedictine, Franciscan or Dominican counterparts. Beyond that, most of what has been written about Norbert over the years has come from Europe, in languages only infrequently rendered into English. And even when they were, his story was seldom told in a contemporary way. This short and very readable biography supplies that lack.