Feast Day: March 28 Canonized: Pre-Congregation — venerated from the sixth century; feast in the Roman Martyrology; canonized by Pope Nicholas I in 865 Order / Vocation: Lay confessor — King of OrlΓ©ans and Burgundy (561–592) Patron of: Kings · Penitent sinners · Those who have ordered unjust executions · Against death of one's children
"Would to God I could weep out mine eyes in penitence for all my sins." — Saint Guntramnus, at the tomb of his son
The King Who Wept at His Son's Grave
Guntramnus was not a good man in the early part of his life. He was one of three surviving sons of the Frankish king Clotaire I who divided the kingdom between them in 561. He received OrlΓ©ans and Burgundy. He was violent, suspicious, and capable of acts of cruelty that his own biographers document without apology: he ordered the execution of a physician who had failed to save his son Theodebald, then ordered the executions of the physician's family. He put aside one wife. He had a second die in childbirth. He was a man of his world and era, which is to say he was capable of murder and capable of grief, often in the same season.
Then his sons died. Clothaire died of plague. Theodebald died of plague. At the tomb of Theodebald, Guntramnus was seen to weep uncontrollably, striking his breast and crying: Would to God I could weep out mine eyes in penitence for all my sins. The grief, and the self-knowledge that came with it, were the beginning of something. He did not become a monk or a hermit — he remained a king, with all the violence and compromise that kingship in the Merovingian world entailed. But he turned toward what remained of his life with a different orientation.
He became, in the last decades of his reign, what the sources describe as a peacemaker: intervening in the murderous family feuds that consumed the Merovingian dynasty, negotiating rather than warring, protecting his nephew Childebert from assassination more than once, sheltering refugees, building churches and hospitals. He gave lavishly to the poor. When plague returned to his kingdom, he gathered the people together for fasting and prayer rather than flight. He died in 592 having reigned thirty-one years.
The King the Poor Loved
Gregory of Tours, the great chronicler of the Merovingian world, knew Guntramnus personally and wrote about him with the honesty of a bishop who had watched a complicated man grow. He documented the cruelties of the early years and the conversion of the later ones with equal fidelity. He recorded that the people called him the Good — not because he was saintly in the conventional sense, but because among the Merovingian kings he was exceptionally attentive to the poor and exceptionally unwilling to use war when negotiation could serve.
The miracles attributed to him were specific and localized: a woman in the crowd at Tours touched the fringe of his cloak and was healed of a tertian fever. He was unaware of this until told afterward. The healing was the kind of miracle Gregory took seriously — involuntary, unperformed, resembling the Gospel episodes of healing through contact with holiness that resided in a person without that person necessarily directing it.
Pope Nicholas I canonized him in 865, nearly three hundred years after his death. The feast was assigned to March 28, the anniversary of his death. He stands in the calendar as proof that the Church does not require its royal saints to have been saints from the beginning — only that they became what they were made to become, eventually, in whatever time God gave them.
Prayer to Saint Guntramnus
O God, who in Guntramnus took a violent and grieving king and worked on him through the deaths of his sons until the tears at a child's grave became the turning of a life, grant through his intercession that those who have ordered or condoned injustice may find in their grief the beginning of their reform, and that the penitent sinner who holds power may use what remains of it for the service You require. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Guntramnus, pray for us.
| Born | c. 532 — Frankish kingdom |
| Died | 28 March 592 — Chalon-sur-SaΓ΄ne, Burgundy, France — natural death |
| Feast Day | March 28 |
| Order / Vocation | Lay confessor — King of OrlΓ©ans and Burgundy (561–592); son of Clotaire I; brother of Charibert and Sigebert I |
| Canonized | Pope Nicholas I, 865 |
| Patron of | Kings · Penitent sinners · Those who have ordered unjust executions |
| Known as | Gontran · Gontran le Bon (Gontran the Good) · Guntram · Gunthchramnus |
| Primary source | Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum (c. 590) |
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