Saint Rupert of Salzburg

Saint Rupert was a bishop of Worms who, at the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries, came to Bavaria and founded the monastery of Saint Peter on the ruins of the Roman town of Juvavum. From that foundation grew the city of Salzburg and its bishopric. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on March 27.

Nothing certain is known about his youth, nor do we know the year of his birth. He came from a powerful Frankish family of the Rhineland, and he served as bishop in Worms on the Rhine before he set out for the east.

At the end of the seventh century Theodo, duke of Bavaria, asked him to come to his country and strengthen the Church there. The Gospel had been preached in Bavaria before, but the faith had not had time to take root. According to his Life, Rupert stayed first at the duke’s court in Regensburg, then sailed down the Danube to Lorch, and finally settled on Lake Wallersee, in present-day Seekirchen, where he built a church in honor of Saint Peter.

Looking for a better place, he asked the duke for the old Juvavum on the river Salzach, much of which lay in ruins, and he received it. There he built the church and monastery of Saint Peter, which he led as both bishop and abbot; the abbey’s tradition links its beginning with the year 696. More than a decade later he founded a convent of nuns on the Nonnberg hill and made his niece, Saint Erentrude, its first abbess. Both monasteries have existed without interruption to this day.

Duke Theodo and his son Theodbert endowed these foundations generously, among other things with a share in the saltworks at Reichenhall. This is why Rupert is depicted with a salt vessel and venerated as the patron of salt miners, and the town was later named Salzburg, that is, the salt fortress. In the Pongau region he also founded the cell of Saint Maximilian, from which present-day Bischofshofen grew. As the Roman Martyrology says, from Salzburg he spread the Christian faith.

He died on March 27. Tradition says that this happened on Easter Day, which fell on March 27 in the year 718, and so that year is usually given as the date of his death. There is no certainty, however: more recent studies state only that he died after 717. The place of his death is uncertain as well: tradition points to Salzburg, more recent research to Worms, where he is thought to have returned at the end of his life.

In 774 Saint Virgil, bishop of Salzburg, laid his relics in the newly built cathedral. The anniversary of that event, September 24, is still kept by Salzburg as the feast of its patron. There was no formal canonization process: Rupert belongs to the saints venerated since the early Middle Ages, long before the papal procedure came into being. John Paul II, celebrating Mass in Salzburg Cathedral in 1998, called him a good shepherd and an itinerant bishop who found his way to a small, ruined town on the Salzach and dedicated his first church to the Apostle Peter.