Fructuosus of Braga

Fructuosus was the son of a Visigothic general, born into the ruling class of seventh-century Spain. The story that survives has him as a boy riding through the Bierzo country in León with his father to inspect the family's flocks, looking at the mountains, and deciding what he would do with the land when it was his.

When his parents died he did exactly that. He gave the inheritance away, some to the poor, most of it turned into monasteries. He founded Compludo in the Bierzo, then Rufiana (later San Pedro de Montes), then houses in Galicia, then further south, and finally a great monastery near Cádiz. The chroniclers say he kept having to move on because so many people followed him into the monastic life that the crowds destroyed the solitude he had gone looking for.

At one point, according to his early biographer, he tried to slip away to the East by ship and was stopped, the local authorities recognized how much the region would lose, and he was made to stay.

He was appointed bishop of Dumio, near Braga, and about 656 the Tenth Council of Toledo made him metropolitan archbishop of Braga, the chief see of Galicia. He held it until his death, which is placed around 665.

He left two monastic rules. The Regula monachorum governs a single house in careful practical detail. The second, the Regula communis, is more unusual: it addresses whole families who had turned their own farms into monasteries, an arrangement common in Visigothic Spain, and it deals with the messy realities that came with it, property, children, relatives, who owns what, and how a family monastery keeps from becoming a family business. It is among the most socially revealing documents of the period.

His discipline was hard, harder than the Benedictine measure that eventually replaced it. But the network he built held. The monasteries of the Bierzo and Galicia became the schools, hospitals, libraries, and farms of a poor and mountainous country, and several of his foundations were still standing centuries later.

His relics were moved to Santiago de Compostela in the twelfth century. The letters exchanged between him and Braulio of Zaragoza survive, and show two of the busiest churchmen in Spain writing to each other about books.

Sources: Vita Sancti Fructuosi (the anonymous seventh-century life); Fructuosus of Braga, Regula monachorum and Regula communis; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV.