26 January 2026 – Solemnity of the Holy Founders of Cîteaux
Isaiah 44:1, 10-15; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-13a; Mark 10:24b-30
Homily
Communities belonging to the Cistercian Order celebrate today the Solemnity of the three Founders of Cîteaux – and therefore of the Cistercian Order.
The text from the Book of Ben Sira the Wise, which we heard as the first reading of this Eucharistic celebration, invited us to remember these glorious figures who are our ancestors. Robert, Alberic, Stephen and their companions, who were the founders of Cîteaux, are our ancestors in monastic life. It is through them that the particular vision of monastic life that found its expression in the early Cîteaux has been passed on to subsequent generations and has come down to us.
The rapid and rather phenomenal expansion of Cîteaux during the first decades of its existence is generally attributed to the charisma of St Bernard and the large number of vocations. There is obviously a lot of truth in this statement, but one can also consider that the success of all the early foundations of Cîteaux, and that of Clairvaux in particular, is a tribute to the quality of training that all these young recruits received at Cîteaux when they entered. The young knight Bernard, restless and somewhat whimsical, would never have become Saint Bernard if he had not had such teachers.
When Bernard and his young companions entered Cîteaux, they certainly did not find a well-structured training programme with a series of courses and a list of teachers. They were not given a list of books to read, exams to prepare or dissertations to write. They found a community. This community was small, even very small by the standards of the time. Most of the monks were elderly; Robert was over 70; Stephen and Alberic were not much younger. They did not find a training programme, but a few monks trained by the Word of God and long experience of monastic life, and capable of transmitting the values that gave them their raison d'être.
Jesus' dialogue with his disciples, which we have just heard in the Gospel reading, follows the one he had just had with the rich young man who asked him what he must do to have eternal life. Jesus reminded the young man of the main commandments of the Law, and the young man replied that he had practised them since his youth. Jesus then looked at him with tenderness: ‘Jesus looked at him and loved him,’ writes Mark. He then called him to a radical detachment from his riches, and the young man went away sad. Jesus' gaze, which had first fallen on the rich young man, then fell on all those around him, and he made this remark: ‘How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!’ Then, to his bewildered disciples, Jesus repeated, this time in a more absolute way: ‘How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God,’ and he used the highly evocative image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle.
Jesus then looked at his disciples [this is the third time his ‘gaze’ has been mentioned since the beginning of the story] and revealed to them the central message of this story: ‘For men, this is impossible, but not for God: for everything is possible for God.’ It is very important to note that it is precisely in this context that each of the three synoptic Gospels places the promise of a hundredfold, made by Jesus to those who left everything to follow him. The message is that everything is grace; everything is God's work. A life of detachment and radical poverty, however generous and authentic it may be, cannot merit eternal life. Everything is grace. If we have responded to God's call and come to the monastery, and if we are faithful to our monastic commitments, that too is grace. There is only one explanation: ‘everything is possible for God’.
And whenever we experience difficult moments, both in our community life and in our personal vocation, let us remember this truth: ‘everything is possible for God’.
Armand Veilleux