Leudinus, called Bodo, was born about the year 625 in the Bassigny, in the Frankish kingdom of Austrasia; German tradition places his birth a little earlier, around 610, at the lordly villa on the upper Meuse in the Val-de-Meuse. He was the eldest son of Gundoin, duke of the pagus Bassianensis and of the lands toward the Jura, later reckoned the first duke of Alsace, and of his wife Saretrude. His family, the Gundoins, belonged to the great Austrasian nobility, held wide estates in the Bassigny, and was bound by kinship to the Agilolfings and the Burgundofarones; it is remembered as a founding clan of the monastery of Wissembourg. Among his four brothers and sisters were his younger brother Fulculfus-Bodo and his elder sister, Saint Salaberga, who would found the great double monastery of Laon and is honored there on 26 September. His existence is attested in the Life of Saint Sadalberga and, in part, in the Life of Saint Columbanus written by Jonas of Bobbio about 640–643.
Like many noblemen of his age, Leudinus first lived a full life in the world. He married a wife named Odila, and they had a daughter, Theutberga. As an administrator of royal and family lands in southern Austrasia, enjoying the favor of the powerful mayor of the palace Grimoald, he ranged over the country of the Ornois near the valley of the Meuse and up into the Vosges, where about the years 660 and following he stood at the origin of the ban of Étival — the assembly and territory out of which the great parish of Étival in the Vosges would grow. Chroniclers of Toul name him also as founder of the church of Saint-Dizier near Trois-Maisons, in the neighborhood of Bodonis villa, the Bodo estate, today Boudonville on the edge of Nancy.
Grace, however, was working beneath this brilliant career. The exhortations of Saint Walbert of Luxeuil and, still more, the example of his own sister Salaberga persuaded Leudinus and Odila to leave the world together. About the year 657 Odila took the veil in the abbey of Saint-Jean (Notre-Dame) at Laon, which Salaberga had recently founded, and Bodo shut himself up in the neighboring monastery of men. Before entering, he endowed out of his own patrimony the religious houses that keep his memory: at the request of his daughter Theutberga he founded for nuns the Bodonis monasterium, the "monastery of Bodo," later called Bon-Moutier or Bonmoutier, in what is now Val-et-Châtillon; tradition also credits him with the abbey of Étival in the valley of the Meurthe, dated to 663, with Dommèvre-sur-Vezouse, and with Offonville (Othonville, Enfonvelle) on an estate near Bourbonne-les-Bains. The women's house of Bonmoutier afterwards passed to monks and moved to a neighboring hill, where it became the abbey of Saint-Sauveur.
In the cloister he gained so great a reputation for holiness that the clergy and people of Toul chose him for their bishop, with the consent of King Childeric II, most probably after the year 665. He was the seventeenth bishop of that see, successor of Eborinus (Elbonirus) and predecessor of Adeodatus, and he is remembered in the monastic tradition as a Benedictine. Religious writers style him vir egregius, sanctus ac venerabilis — an outstanding man, holy and venerable.
The mountain tradition of the Vosges also preserves the memory of hard years. Within a decade of its beginning, the great ban of Étival fractured; men whose names survive in the oldest local records — Gondelbert at Senones, Deodatus, Spinulus — led dissident communities that sought freedom from the lordship of Leudinus and his house. At first firm and unyielding, Bodo in the end conceded to their resistance and preferred agreement to war; and it is a mark of the goodwill he retained that the very people of Étival came to honor him as their patron and to carve him in stone with hat, mitre and crozier, the insignia of the bishop he was to become.
He died about the year 673, and was buried in the crypt of Saint-Mansuy at Toul in 672 or 673; some accounts place his death as late as 678. The abbey of Saint-Jean of Laon, where he had first embraced the monastic life with his wife, long possessed a great part of his relics. His feast is kept on 11 September, and his name lives on in the landscape he sanctified — Bonmoutier, Boudonville, Badonviller — where a rich and powerful man gave his fields away so that God might be praised in them.
May Saint Leudinus Bodo obtain for us the same holy detachment, that we too may give away what we possess for the glory of God and the good of souls, and begin today by one act of generosity that costs us something.
