PÉRIGUEUX, DIOCESI di. — City and diocese, capital of the prefecture of the Dordogne department, in south-western France. The city is situated in a valley on the right bank of the Isle. The diocese extends over 9182 sq km, with a population of 386,000 inhabitants, of whom 381,000 are Catholics, distributed among 536 parishes served by 334 diocesan priests and 25 religious; it has 1 major and 2 minor seminaries.
P. is the ancient “Vesunna Petrocoriorum”; of a temple dedicated to Tutela Vesunna there remains the cella now called the “Tour de Veson.” The city suffered greatly from the invasions of the Vandals, Visigoths, Franks, Saracens, and Normans. The authority of the bishops and counts of Périgord subsequently became established there. In 1356 the English settled there; the Calvinists occupied it from 1575 to 1581, devastating its churches. Christianity must already have been established there in the 4th century, since Sulpicius Severus attests that in 361 its bishop, named Paternus, was deposed for heresy. Tradition makes s. Fronto the first bishop of P. He was supposedly succeeded by Anianus and Pegasius, mentioned by Gregory of Tours (Historia Francorum, II, 13). Sidonius Apollinaris writes that, in the time of King Henry, P. was without a shepherd (Ep., VIII, 6). The bishop Chronopius was present at the Councils of Agde (506) and Orléans (511 and 533), whose epitaph was composed by Venantius Fortunatus (418). Then Carterius appears at the Council of Mâcon in 586 and Saffarius in 590; at the Council of Paris in 614 there was Aggo; Ermenomaria was at Bordeaux in 673–75. As for s. Fronto, s. Gangericus of Cambrai attests that he visited the confessor’s tomb in a church (Anal. Bolland, 7 [1888], p. 394). Rabanus Maurus indicates him as a bishop in his Matritiologie. On 13 Jan. 1318, John XXII detached 210 parishes from the diocese in order to raise the Benedictine abbey of the Most Holy Saviour of Sarlat (now a subprefecture) to an episcopal see; it had been founded in the 8th century under the patronage of s. Sacerdos or Serdot (bishop of Limoges), as the church is still called today. It was a cathedral from 1317 until the suppression of the diocese in 1790. Of the Romanesque building of the 12th century, the façade tower with its portico remains; the five statues in the portal were mutilated; the rest was rebuilt in the 16th and 17th centuries. The interior has a single nave with a 17th-century cathedra. By the Concordat of 1801, the dioceses of P. and Sarlat were united with that of Angoulême; the diocese of P. was re-established in 1821. The church of P. is the only one in France that celebrates the feast of Charlemagne on 28 Jan. More recent bishops of P. included Raymond V,
Cardinal de Pons (1220–23); Elia de Bourdeilles (1447–68), later a cardinal and blessed; Claudio de Longwy, Cardinal of Givry (1540–47); and Gousset (1836–40), later cardinal archbishop of Reims. The Latin poet Paolino di P. and the theologian Cardinal de Talleyrand-Périgord (1301–64) were from P.
The church of S. Stefano, or de la Cité, built in the 12th century, was the cathedral until 1669. Originally it had four domes and a bell tower, but all were ruined by the Calvinists in 1575; two domes remain, of which the western is earlier than 1120, while the eastern dates from around 1150. Inside, the Baptistery is beneath a Romanesque tabernacle dating from around 1160; there is also the tomb of Bishop Giovanni d’Asside (1160–69), and farther on the epitaph of Bishop P. de Minet (1182); in the choir, on the right, the paschal table is engraved, beginning in 1163. It was restored between 1852 and 1901. A cloister, now destroyed, led to the episcopal palace (1378), which contained the Chapel erected in 1521 by Bishop Guido di Castelnau (1511–23); some remains of the palace are beneath the convent of S. Marta. In 1669 the cathedral of P. was transferred to the church of S. Fronto, already consecrated as an abbey church in 1407 by Aimone di Borbone, archbishop of Bourges; it had a Latin-cross plan and three naves. The Musée du Périgord is housed in a building constructed in 1904 on the site of the Augustinian convent, of which the Chapel remains. It contains prehistoric collections, an epigraphic collection, and an archaeological collection with statues, a taurobolic altar, funerary stelae, sarcophagi—including a Christian one from the 6th century discovered at Bourg-sur-Gironde—medieval altars and tombstones, and a painting museum. The abbey of Chancelade was founded in 1128, with a church dating from the 12th century, restored in the 14th, 16th, and 17th centuries. In 1115 the Cistercians founded the monastery of Cadouin, consecrated in 1154. As early as 1140, a confraternity had been established in honour of a relic known as the Holy Shroud, brought back from the First Crusade by a Pierre Raoul or Gérard of Périgord (J. Mayjonade, Le St. Suaire de Cadouin, Paris 1903). But ecclesiastical authority has recognized that the relic is not authentic; it is a precious textile bearing an inscription in Kufic characters from the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century.