Ancient Archdiocese of Vienne

The Archbishopric of Vienne, named after its episcopal see Vienne in the Isère département of southern France, was a metropolitan Roman Catholic archdiocese. It is now part of the Archdiocese of Lyon.

The legend according to which Crescens, the first Bishop of Vienne, is identical with the Crescens of Saint Paul's Second Letter to Timothy, iv, 20 certainly postdates the letter of Pope Zosimus to the Church of Arles (417) and the letter of the bishops of Gaul in 451; because, although both these documents allude to the claims to glory which Arles owes to St. Trophimus, neither of them mentions Crescens. Archbishop Ado of Vienne (860-75) set afoot this legend of the Apostolic origin of the See of Vienne and put down St. Zachary, St. Martin and St. Verus, later successors of Crescens, as belonging to the Apostolic period. This legend was confirmed by the Recueil des privilèges de l'Eglise de Viene, which, however, was not compiled under the supervision of the future Pope Callistus II, as M. Gundlach maintained, but a little earlier, about 1060, as Louis Duchesne proved. This collection contains the pretended letters of a series of popes, from Pius I to Paschal II, and sustains the claims of the Church of Vienne. Le Livre épiscopal de l'archevêque Léger (1030–1070) included both the inventions of Ado and the forged letters of the Recueil.

It is historically certain that Verus, present at the Council of Arles (314), was the fourth Bishop of Vienne. In the beginning the twelve cities of the two Roman Viennese provinces were under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Vienne, but when Arles was made an archbishopric, at the end of the fourth century, the see of Vienne grew less important. The disputes that later arose between it and the metropolitan of Arles concerning their respective antiquity are well known in ecclesiastical history.

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