ST GERLACH OF HOUTHEM, HERMIT - 5 JANUARY

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN JANUARY

Saints celebrated on the 5th of January

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SAINT GERLACH OF HOUTHEM, HERMIT

Saint Gerlach (Gerlacus), a hermit and penitent from Belgium, born of noble parents, was trained for military service from an early age. He was suitable for this because of his strong body, his height and his personal courage. Unfortunately, he gave himself over to an exuberant life. His military zeal degenerated into brutality, so that he even mistreated his mother. 

Excitedly he once watched a knightly tournament, when a messenger interrupted his entertainment by informing Gerlach of the sudden death of his wife at Jülich.

This trauma became the reason for his conversion through God's providence. He had arrived at the tournament as a fun-loving knight and departed from it with overwhelming thoughts of penance. From Strahlburg (in what is now the Duchy of Limburg) he set off not long after for a pilgrimage to Rome. Upon arrival in the eternal city he confessed his sins to the Pope with a contrite and humble heart and asked him to give him some hard public penance. Gerlach thereupon was told to stay at the Hospitaller monastery in Jerusalem for seven years to perform any task the abbot would order him to do, including all very unpleasant jobs.  This St Gerlach did. He travelled to the Holy Land, looked after the cattle in Palestine as he was instructed to, and performed an array of other menial tasks in a sincere penitential zeal. 

When his seven years of penance were successfully completed, he returned to Rome, where he was told that he was now free to live his normal life, but that he ought to endeavour from now on to live in the world as if he did not live in it. When he got back home, he continued his penances, sheltering in a hollowed-out old oak tree, near his father's home, in order to make up for the vexations of his youth by the example of continued penitence.

In imitation of the life of Egyptian hermits, he ate nothing but bread. which he sprinkled with ashes, drank only water and mortified his body with a rough penitential garment interwoven with iron wires. He stood barefoot in the snow, which started to melt from the heat of his devotion (Menzels Symb.* I. 108). As long as he still had his strength, he got up every night after a short rest to go to Maastricht to the Church of Saint Servatius and attend Holy Mass there. On Saturdays he went to the cathedral church in Aachen to venerate the Blessed Mother of God. 

After some years, some mean monks of Meersen, in whose parish the saint's hermitage was situated, accused him before the bishop of Liège, reporting that Gerlach was a hypocrite who had hidden great treasures under the stones on which he slept. They nagged on at the bishop to have the oak tree, Gerlach's meagre home, cut down and to have his life closely scrutinized. The result of the bishop's investigation, however, was that the saint received from the bishop himself a new hermitage, consisting of two cells. One was intended for performing prayers and was furnished with an altar, where the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass could be celebrated from time to time; the other, low and narrow like a grave, was used by Gerlach for sleeping. 

The reputation of his holiness spread ever further, especially since Saint Hildegardis in Mainz sent him the wreath she had received of Bishop Heinrich on the day she was invested as a sign of their spiritual closeness. Gerlach gave holy counsel to those who flocked to him for advice as appropriate to each individual's status. His pious and spotless life also meant that he had to endure the most severe challenges from the evil enemy. But heavenly consolations were not lacking either. Once the spring water he drank was turned into wine - a miracle that was repeated a second and third time when, fearing devilish deception, he poured the wine away. 

After his death, numerous miracles occurred at his grave. His veneration, especially in the Premonstratensian Order, increased. Monasteries and places of worship emerged that bore his name, e.g. Gerlachsheim in Baden, which lasted a very long time only to have to succumb to the storm of secularization in 1803. According to Hack (p. 345), Gerlach is usually painted as a hermit, next to the hollow tree in which he lived for a long time, or the hermitage. The thorn in his foot featured on these depictions signifies his penance in Palestine, where he wounded himself with a thorn on the same foot with which he had once kicked his mother. (I. 304.)

(Information from Stadler's Complete Encyclopedia of Saints, Volume 2, Augsburg, 1861, pp. 407-08)

*A hagiography source used by the authors 

Stadler's Complete Encyclopedia of Saints - Sources and Abbreviations

PRAYER:

Grant, we beseech you, almighty God, that the venerable feast of Saint Gerlach may increase our devotion and promote our salvation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Sources of these articles (in the original German): books.google.co.uk, de-academic.com, zeno.org, openlibrary.org