This coming year, the Premonstratensian Order is celebrating a jubilee for the 900th anniversary of its foundation; at the Strahov Monastery in Prague, the shrine which contains the relics of their founder, St Norbert, was recently opened up, and the relics exposed for veneration. A Facebook page dedicated to the various orders and congregations of Augustinian Canons Regular, including the Premonstratensians, published these photographs of the actual bones of St Norbert, which we share by the kind permission of Dom Jakobus, a canon of Herzogenburg Abbey in Austria, who administers the page. (It is frequently updated with many interesting pictures, both modern and historical, of the canons and their liturgies.)
Our best wishes for this coming year to all of the Canons Regular of Prémontré – feliciter!
Our best wishes for this coming year to all of the Canons Regular of Prémontré – feliciter!
St Norbert died in 1134 as archbishop of Magdeburg, in the modern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and was buried in choir of his order’s local church. The city was one of the first to turn Protestant in the 16th century, and although the Saint’s relics were not profaned, as were those of so many others, it was no longer possible for Catholics to venerate them. During the Thirty Years’ War, however, the abbot of Strahov, the Premonstratensian house in Prague, was able to recover them during a temporary Catholic occupation of the area, and bring them to back to his abbey, where they were officially installed on May 2nd, 1627, and have remained to this day.
