Rodolfo Gabrielli

Rodolfo Gabrielli (also called Rodolfo the bishop) was born at Camporeggiano in 1034 and died at Gubbio on 17 October 1064. He was a Benedictine monk, a Camaldolese hermit and bishop of Gubbio from 1059 to 1064. He is honored as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church and remembered on 26 June.

His brother John Gabrielli was the first abbot of the abbey of San Bartolomeo, and his brother Peter, later beatified, also entered Fonte Avellana as a monk in 1057. Rodolfo became a disciple of Saint Peter Damian at Fonte Avellana, the nursery of ascetics, where he studied philosophy and theology and excelled in the Latin language. He then took the monastic habit and, ordained priest, began a severe life of prayer and penance: he tortured himself to tame the exuberance of youth, wore a hair shirt, abstained from meat, eggs and cheese, and slept on a wooden board without covers. Weakened by mortification, he devised for his cell an ingenious system of ropes to hold himself up while reciting the psalms. He was a zealous practitioner of the public self-⁠accusation of his faults, on which occasion he asked to be scourged by two brothers.

Peter Damian always held a high opinion of the young monk: in a letter this doctor of the Church had asked Rodolfo to review his writings and correct whatever he might find contrary to Catholic doctrine. So in 1058, though he had not yet reached the canonical age, Peter Damian proposed him to Pope Nicholas II as his own replacement in the office of bishop of Gubbio, from which he himself had obtained to be relieved.

He is a local saint of the West; he died in 1064, before 1066 but after the separation of 1054. No Orthodox synodal canonization is known.