ST. ALBERT THE GREAT
Patron of Students and Researchers of Natural Sciences.
November 15

St. Albert was born in a castle on the Danube in 1206, the same year that St. Dominic first gathered holy women from Fanjeaux to live in community in Prouille. In 1222 Albert entered the Order of Preachers having been inspired by the friars he met while a student at the University of Padua.

Albert embraced Dominican life to the fullest, supported by and living out the pillars that are its hallmarks. He began all his study with prayer. He preached from the pulpit as well as from the podium. He had the great gift of combining human wisdom with divine faith which always led him to a greater knowledge and love of God. As a remarkable teacher he had a keen investigative and scientific approach to all knowledge and learning and he passed this eagerness on to his students at the University of Paris and the University of Cologne. Perhaps his most famous student was Thomas Aquinas.

Albert was a great natural scientist and for centuries he was the authority on physics, geography, astronomy, mineralogy, chemistry and biology. The heart and soul of his life was teaching although he spent some years as the pope’s personal theologian in the 1250’s and two years as Bishop of Regensburg in the 1260’s. Here he would have been the bishop of Holy Cross Monastery (established in 1233) from where our founding Sisters came to America. He resigned from being a bishop to return to teaching at the University of Cologne and living among his religious brothers. He died at the age of 73 on November 15, 1280. St. Albert’s life can continue to inspire us in this Jubilee year as we Open the Sacred Circle and invite each other into right relationship with God, ourselves, others, and the Earth.