Périgueux, Diocese of

PÉRIGUEUX, Diocese of. - City and diocese, capital of the prefecture of the department of Dordogne, in southwestern France. The city is situated in a valley on the right bank of the Isle. The diocese extends over 9,182 sq km, with a population of 386,000 inhabitants, of whom 381,000 are Catholics, distributed in 536 parishes served by 334 diocesan priests and 25 regulars; it has 1 major seminary and 2 minor ones.

P. is the ancient "Vesunna Petrocoriorum"; of a temple dedicated to Tutela Vesunna the cella still remains, today called the "Tour de Veson." The city suffered greatly from the invasions of the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Franks, the Saracens and the Normans. Then the authority of the bishops and counts of Périgord 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, because Sulpicius Severus attests that in 361 its bishop, by the name of Paternus, was deposed for heresy. Tradition makes St. Fronto the first bishop of P. He was supposedly succeeded by Anianus and Pegasius, cited by Gregory of Tours (Historia Francorum, II, 13). Sidonius Apollinaris writes that, in the time of King Euric, P. was without a pastor (Ep., VIII, 6). At the Councils of Agde (506) and of Orléans (511 and 533) the bishop Cronopius was present, whose epitaph was composed by Venantius Fortunatus (418). Then at the Councils of Mâcon appear Carterius in 586 and Saffarius in 590; while at the Council of Paris of 614 one finds Aggo; Ermenomaria was at Bordeaux in 673-75. As for St. Fronto, St. Gangeric of Cambrai attests to having visited the tomb of the confessor in a church (Anal. Bolland, 7 [1888], p. 394). Rabanus Maurus in his Martyrologium indicates him as bishop. John XXII on 13 Jan. 1318 dismembered the diocese, removing 210 parishes from it in order to raise to episcopal see the Benedictine abbey of the Most Holy Savior of Sarlat (today a subprefecture), founded in the 8th century under the patronage of St. Sacerdos or Serdot (bishop of Limoges), as the church is still called today, cathedral from 1317 until the suppression of the diocese in 1790. Of the Romanesque building of the 12th century the tower of the facade remains with its portico; 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. With the Concordat of 1801 the dioceses of P. and Sarlat were united to that of Angoulême; the diocese of P. was reestablished in 1821. The church of P. is the only one in France that celebrates on 28 Jan. the feast of Charlemagne. Bishops of P. in more recent times were Raymond V, cardinal of Pons (1220-23); Elias de Bourdeilles (1447-68), later cardinal and blessed; Claude de Longwy, cardinal of Givry (1540-47), and Gousset (1836-40), later cardinal archbishop of Reims. From P. came the Latin poet Paulinus of P., the theologian Card. de Talleyrand-Périgord (1301-64).

The church of St. Stephen, or de la Cité, built in the 12th century, was the Cathedral until 1669. Originally it had four domes and a bell tower, but everything was ruined by the Calvinists in 1575; two domes remain, of which the western one is earlier than 1120, while the eastern one is of about 1150. In the interior the Baptistery is beneath a Romanesque ciborium of about 1160; there is the tomb of bishop John d'Asside (1160-69), further on the epitaph of bishop P. de Minet (1182); in the choir on the right the Easter table is inscribed beginning from 1163. It was restored between 1852 and 1901. A cloister, today destroyed, led to the Episcopal Palace (1378), containing the Chapel erected in 1521 by bishop Guy de Castelnau (1511-23); some remains of the Palace are beneath the convent of St. Martha. In 1669 the cathedral of P. was transferred to the church of St. Fronto, already consecrated as an abbey church in 1407 by Aymon of Bourbon, archbishop of Bourges; it was in the form of a Latin cross and had three naves. The Museum of Périgord is in a building constructed in 1904 on the site of the convent of the Augustinians, of which the Chapel remains. It contains prehistoric collections, an epigraphic collection, an archaeological collection with statues, a taurobolic altar, funerary cippi, sarcophagi, among them a Christian one of the 6th century found at Bourg-sur-Gironde, medieval altars and tombstones, and a painting museum. The abbey of Chancelade founded in 1128, with a church of 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 instituted in honor of a relic said to be of the Holy Shroud brought back from the First Crusade by a Pierre Raoul or Gérard del Périgord (J. Mayjonade, Le St. Suaire de Cadouin, Paris 1903). But the ecclesiastical authority has recognized that the relic is not authentic; it is a precious fabric with an inscription in Kufic characters of the late 11th and early 12th century.

Enrico Josi