He was born about the year 670 in Frankish territory, at Châtres on the road to Orléans, near what is now Saint-Germain-lès-Arpajon south of Paris. At baptism he received the name Waldegiso after his father, a Frank called Waltekis; but the father seems to have died while the child was still an infant, and his mother, an Irishwoman named Corbiniana, renamed her son Corbinian after herself. Of his childhood nothing else is remembered. All that we know of his life comes to us through the Vita Corbiniani written by Arbeo, Bishop of Freising, whose devotion to the saint would one day bring his bones home.
While still young Corbinian chose the hidden life. He built himself a cell beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Germain and there lived as a recluse for fourteen years, alone with God in prayer, fasting, and silence. But God does not let such lamps stay under a bushel. The fame of his holiness, strengthened by the report of miracles and by the shrewd, kindly wisdom of the counsel he gave to souls, spread through the whole country, and men came to him in such numbers that he clothed some of the most fervent in a common discipline and formed them into a religious community. His hermitage had become a place of pilgrimage — and this, to his own reckoning, was a loss. The crowd distracted him from the one thing necessary.
Seeking a deeper obscurity, and moved by his great devotion to Saint Peter, he set out for Rome, meaning to find a cell near the church of the Prince of the Apostles and there disappear. He went with some of his disciples. But when he asked the Pope's blessing, the Pope discerned his gifts and told him plainly that he had no right to live for himself alone while whole nations, ripe for the harvest, were perishing for lack of laborers. Corbinian was frightened at such words; yet he had learned to obey rather than resist the voice of God. Consecrated bishop and given a commission to preach the Gospel, he returned first to his own country, where his preaching bore rich fruit among the people. Fame, however, was a burden to him; tradition relates that he withdrew again for seven years to his hermitage of Saint Germain and then journeyed a second time to Rome to beg the Pope to relieve him of his charge. Pope Gregory II refused, and sent him back to the harvest. On the road, passing through Bavaria, he converted many idolaters; and it was to that abandoned vineyard that the Pope finally commanded him to give his whole life.
His travels brought him at length into the Duchy of Bavaria, where at the wish of Duke Grimoald he settled near Freising, probably arriving about 720–724. On a hill by Freising, where a sanctuary already stood, he raised a Benedictine monastery and a school, dedicated first to Saint Vitus and afterwards to Saint Stephen — the house that in the eleventh century became Weihenstephan Abbey. He built up the church of Freising and made it the center of Christian life in Bavaria, so that later ages honored him as its first bishop and as a Father of the faith among that people. Though tireless in his apostolic work, he was careful never to load himself with more business than he could carry without forgetting what he owed his own soul: he sang the divine office slowly and without haste, and kept set hours every day for meditation, so that the vigor of his interior life might never be spent by the labor of his outward one.
On the way to Rome, tradition tells, a bear fell upon the saint's pack horse and killed it; Corbinian, after praying, commanded the beast to shoulder the load itself in penance, and the bear carried his baggage all the way to the city, where the saint set it free to lumber back to its native forest. From this legend comes his emblem, the saddled bear: the wild strength of nature bowed by grace, the ferocity of paganism tamed for the service of Christ, and the bishop himself broken to the yoke of his office.
His courage was tested where courage costs most. Soon after settling at Freising, Corbinian publicly denounced Duke Grimoald's marriage to Biltrudis, his brother's widow, forbidden by the Church's law. The duke's anger and the fury of his wife fell upon him; she scorned him as a foreign meddler and at last contrived a plot to have him murdered. Corbinian withdrew from Freising rather than compromise. He went to the monastery he had founded at Kuens near Merano and labored for some years in what is now South Tyrol, where about 725 he raised an oratory in honor of Saints Valentine and Zeno. When Grimoald had been killed and Biltrudis carried off by invaders, the new duke, Hugbert, invited the bishop back, and Corbinian took up again the work that violence had interrupted, continuing his apostolic labors at Freising until the end.
Feeling death draw near, he asked the duke that he might be buried at the castle of Mais, near Merano; and when he died on 8 September, about the year 730, his body was carried from the church of Our Lady to the place he had chosen. But the people who venerated him would not leave him in a distant grave. Bishop Arbeo of Freising, his biographer, set himself to bring the saint home, and in the winter of 768–769 the translation was accomplished: on 24 February 769 the relics arrived at Freising, and were laid in the crypt of the cathedral, where since the end of the nineteenth century they have rested in the neo-Romanesque Korbinian shrine. His feast is kept on 8 September in France, and on 20 November — the commemoration of the translation of his relics — in Bavaria and among the Orthodox Churches; German Lutherans remember him on 8 September as a witness to Christ. He is patron of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising and city patron of Freising, and the cathedral of Évry, in whose diocese his birthplace lies, is dedicated to him, as is the church of San Corbiniano in Rome. His bear still stands in the arms of Freising, and Pope Benedict XVI, once Archbishop of Munich and Freising, took it into his own coat of arms and then into his papal shield, seeing in it his own soul tamed by God to bear the burdens laid upon him.
May Saint Corbinian obtain for us his two great graces — the courage to speak God's truth to the powerful whatever it costs, and the discipline to guard, in the midst of much work, the daily hours of prayer without which no work is holy.
