Blessed Aymard of Cluny

Aymard of Cluny, also known as Aymardus of Cluny was the third abbot of Cluny. His feast day is 5 October. Very little is known about his life and the only references come from the biographies of Odo of Cluny or Majolus of Cluny. Odo, the second Abbot of Cluny spent a great deal of time in Italy in the last five years of his life. It is thought that Aymardus must have been appointed as Odo's replacement in running the monastery during this time while he was gone. When Odo died in the year 942, the other monks of Cluny wanted their prior, Hildebrand to become Abbot, but Hildebrand refused to become abbot. So they elected Aymardus to be abbot instead. On the day of his election, Aymardus was supposedly seen entering the monastery leading a horse carrying fish, and the monks were so struck by the sight that they immediately elected him abbot. Like Odo and Berno before him, Aymardus also was devoted to upholding the Rule of St Benedict in an unstained form. However, unlike Odo, Aymardus took greater attention to the material concerns of the monastery and took efforts at organizing the gifts that the monastery received in a practical way. Cluny's property expanded in his time as abbot and he was remembered as having good organizational skills over all the properties that were owned by the monastery. Two additional monasteries came under Cluny's jurisdiction when Aymardus was abbot, which were Celsiniacus (Sauxillanges), and the Abbey of St Amand's near St Paul-Trois-Chateaux. Aymardus became blind in his last years and he resigned as abbot in the year 954; he still had eleven years left in his life. He was said to have bore his blindness without uttering the slightest complaint about it. Aymardus called on the monks to elect a new abbot, and he urged them to elect Majolus of Cluny, and they therefore did so. He said, 'Ill, blind, and weary, I can no longer be responsible for the interests of the monastery, nor fittingly watch over its welfare.