Saint Virgil of Salzburg

Saint Virgil of Salzburg was a learned Irish monk who in the eighth century became bishop of Salzburg. There he built a cathedral in honor of Saint Rupert and worked to spread the faith among the Carantanians, Slavs living in the lands of present-day Carinthia. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on November 27.

He came from Ireland, as sources from his own time already attest, but nothing certain is known about his life in his homeland or about the year of his birth. Since the seventeenth century he has been identified with Fergil, abbot of the monastery of Aghaboe, but this remains a conjecture.

According to a Salzburg account from the ninth century, in 743 he arrived at the court of Pepin, mayor of the palace of the Franks and later king, who after two years sent him to Bavaria. The duke there, Odilo, entrusted him with the direction of the diocese of Salzburg and of the Abbey of Saint Peter. At first he governed as abbot, without episcopal consecration, while ordinations were conferred by his companion, the Irish bishop Dobdagrec. The date of his own consecration is not certain: more recent research points to the year 749, older works to later years.

In Bavaria he came into conflict with Saint Boniface, the papal legate. When a certain priest with a poor knowledge of Latin garbled the words of the baptismal formula, Boniface judged that those baptized had to be baptized again. Virgil and his companion Sidonius laid the matter before Rome. In a letter of July 1, 746, Pope Zachary ruled that a baptism conferred without error in faith, merely out of ignorance of the language, is valid and is not to be repeated. From a papal letter of May 1, 748, we know that Boniface charged Virgil with teaching that beneath the earth there is another world and other people. Zachary ordered the matter to be examined, but the sources say nothing of any trial or condemnation. Virgil’s writings have not survived, so we cannot know these views more exactly.

As bishop, Virgil put the diocese in order and saw to its endowment. He did not go himself to Carantania, whose duke had asked for preachers of the faith, but sent there the missionary bishop Modestus with a group of priests. In Salzburg he raised a new cathedral, dedicated in 774, and transferred to it the relics of Saint Rupert, the first bishop of the city. On his initiative the Salzburg confraternity book was also begun in 784, a register of persons commended to the prayer of the community and the oldest surviving book of its kind.

He died in Salzburg on November 27, 784, after nearly forty years at the head of the Church there, and was buried in the cathedral he had built. In 1181, during the construction of a new cathedral, his tomb was found, which revived his veneration. Pope Gregory IX canonized him in 1233. Together with Saint Rupert he is honored as patron of the Archdiocese of Salzburg. In a homily in Salzburg in 1998, John Paul II recalled him as the holy bishop from Ireland who consecrated the first cathedral of the city.