Procession with Relics of St Norbert

Yesterday was the feast of St Norbert, the founder of the Premonstratensian Order, who died in 1134 as archbishop of Magdeburg, in the modern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The city was one of the first to turn Protestant in the 16th-century, and although the relics of the Saint 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 abbey of 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.

A Facebook page dedicated to the various orders and congregations of Augustinian Canons Regular, including the Premonstratensians, marked the feast with some nice old photographs of the shrine in Strahov Abbey, and of a procession held in Prague with the relics of St Norbert; they are not precisely dated, but František Kordač, who was Archbishop of Prague from 1919-1931, is shown in the procession. They are here reproduced 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.