Roman Catholic Diocese of Saint-Dié

The Diocese of Saint-Dié ( la, Dioecesis Sancti Deodatiis, link=no; french: Diocèse de Saint-Dié, link=no is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the Catholic Church in France. The diocese has the same boundaries as the ''département'' of the Vosges. The bishop's cathedra is Saint-Dié Cathedral in the town now named Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, but since 1944 has lived in Épinal, capital of the ''département''. The Diocese of Saint–Dié is a suffragan diocese in the ecclesiastical province of the metropolitan Archdiocese of Besançon. The current bishop is Jean-Paul Marie Mathieu, who was appointed in December 2005.

History

The Diocese of Saint-Dié originated in the celebrated abbey of that name. Saint Deodatus (Dié) (b. towards the close of the sixth century; died 679) came, according his legendary written in 1050 by benedictin monks of Moyenmoutier, from Nevers and the Nivernais.

According to some historians, we do not known where Deodatus comes from : a hypothesis proposed from Ireland which explained the Latin reading confusion between ''Niverniensis'' and ''hiberniensis'', others searchers think he could be a Christian who has travelled a lot, and may be lived in the North of Britain's Islands. He may be educated too in Austrasia by Scottish monks attracted by the reputation of Saint Columbanus.

Some sceptical scientists add this legend would definitely distinguish Déodat as a holy itinerant who was not a benedictin monk : he comes from nowhere. Maybe he was just a Christian chief. Only one fact is sure : Déodat is the founder and first patron of a Merovingian district with political and religious power, a ban decided by the king of Austrasia Childeric II.This territory takes a lot of montanous land from his ''fiscus'', or royal reserve named ''foresta'', but integers private domains and little villages too And, after his dead, he was considered and consacred by local populations as a holy man. As, for orthodoxic thinkers of these times, only monk could be perfect, Déodat was becoming gradually a monk.

Legendary versions show this holy man, in old French ''Bonhomme'' on little mountainous paths between Rambervillers and Colmar. They tell us he made the acquaintance of Saints Arbogast and Florentius and walked with through the passes. From Alsace, sometimes from the Heilige Wald, German term for Hollywood, near Haguenau, he withdrew to the Vosges, sojourning at Romont where he began a lot of miracles, and Arentelle, where the inhabitants were hostile. For some time he was a solitary at Wilra or Wibra, maybee near the present Katzenthal in Alsace, but being persecuted by the inhabitants, he walked with a big stick who planted in soil created always a spring of water. Above the pass of Bonhomme, on the top of Rossberg, he launched an ironed arm until a locus called Petit-Saint-Dié under the Kemberg, a mountain, precisely under rocks Saint-Martin. Springs of flowed on this left side of the Meurthe, and he founded a refuge under rocks and near above springs. Once he received this lands in 669 he decided to work. His first monastery hardly built with new brothership, he was tied and dreamed to build a monastery in a little hill "Juncturae" in the right side of the river, the future Galilée. Longtime a prairie, then a little town, and now the center of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges stand between this two places.

Before this time, Leudin Bodo, Bishop of Toul, had founded to the north-west of Saint-Dié the monastery of Bonmoutier for his daughter and to the south of Bonmoutier that of Etival; Saint Gondelbert, perhaps after resigning the Archbishopric of Sens, had just founded Senones Abbey to the east. These four monasteries formed, by their geographical position the four extremities of a cross. Later, Saint Hidulphus, Bishop of Trier

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