Saint Remigius of Reims

Saint Remigius was the bishop of Reims who baptized Clovis, king of the Franks, and opened the way to the faith for his people. He is called the apostle of the Franks. The Church commemorates him on January 13, the day of his death.

He was born around 437 near Laon, in northern Gaul, into a distinguished Gallo-Roman family. The exact year of his birth is not known. His mother was Saint Cilinia, and his brother became bishop of Soissons. Remigius received a careful education. Gregory of Tours, who wrote about him a few decades after his death, recalls his wisdom and his skill in the art of rhetoric. According to tradition he was chosen bishop of Reims when he was only twenty-two years old.

His ministry fell at a time when the rule of Rome was collapsing in Gaul and the pagan Franks were taking power. Two letters of Remigius to their king Clovis have survived. In one of them the bishop advises the ruler to respect the bishops and listen to their counsel, to judge justly, to support widows and orphans, and to ransom captives.

Clovis’s wife, Saint Clotilde, was a Catholic. Gregory of Tours relates that it was she who asked Remigius to instruct the king secretly in the faith. Clovis was baptized at Reims, and with him more than three thousand of his warriors. The bishop is said to have called on the king then to bow his neck humbly, to worship what he had burned, and to burn what he had worshiped. Tradition places this baptism on Christmas Day in 496, but the date is not certain: historians point to years from 496 to 508.

The king’s baptism opened the way for the Franks into the Catholic Church, and France was later called the eldest daughter of the Church. Remigius rebuilt the life of the Church that the invasions had destroyed. He appointed bishops in the cities of northern Gaul, among them Laon and Arras, where he sent Saint Vedast. Pope Benedict XVI called him a great pastor and the founder of several dioceses.

He died at Reims on January 13, around 533, at a great age. The Roman Martyrology speaks of more than sixty years of his ministry as bishop, and an old tradition of as many as seventy-four. He was buried at Reims, and an abbey grew up beside his tomb. In 1049 Pope Leo IX consecrated a new basilica there, into which the saint’s relics were solemnly transferred on October 1. That is why the old Roman calendar commemorated Remigius on October 1. In France his memorial is kept on January 15.

Remigius was venerated as a saint as early as the sixth century, long before the canonization process came into being. A later legend tells that during the baptism of Clovis a dove brought from heaven an ampulla of holy oil. At Reims, the city of that baptism, the kings of France were anointed for centuries. In 1996 Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass there on the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis.