On October 1 the local calendars of France and the Archdiocese of Reims keep the feast of St. Remigius (c. 437-533), Bishop of Reims and "Apostle of the Franks" — the man who baptized Clovis I on Christmas Day, 496, and so made Christian France. The date commemorates the translation of his relics to the Abbey of Saint-Remi, a feast kept in the 1960 General Roman Calendar and retained in French diocesan calendars and the calendar of the Church of England. The Eastern churches keep his memory on January 13, the date of his death.
Remigius was elected Bishop of Reims at twenty-one, while still a layman, and held the see for over seven decades. The pivotal moment came when Clovis, pagan king of the Salian Franks, vowed to accept his wife Clotilde's God if granted victory over the Alemanni at Tolbiac. Victorious, Clovis was baptized by Remigius at Reims on December 25, 496, with some three thousand Frankish warriors following their king into the font. "Bow your head in meekness, Sicamber," Remigius told him, "adore what you have burnt and burn what you have adored." A later legend, first recorded by Archbishop Hincmar in the ninth century, held that a dove descended from heaven bearing a vial of sacred chrism — the Sainte Ampoule — for the anointing. That oil became the chrism of every French coronation for the next thousand years.
Reims is the pilgrimage city of Remigius. The Basilique Saint-Remi, the oldest church in the city, houses his relics in an elaborate nineteenth-century tomb in the choir — the same basilica to which his relics were translated in 1099, the event this feast commemorates. The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims, the coronation cathedral of the French kings, stands a short walk away; the Palais du Tau beside it preserves fragments of the Holy Ampulla in its treasury. Together the three monuments form a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The 1099 translation that gives this feast its date was witnessed by a young theology student from Cologne named Bruno, who had come to Reims to study under the school Remigius had made famous. Bruno would teach at Reims for nearly twenty years before refusing the Archbishopric of Reggio and withdrawing to the Alps to found the Carthusian Order. From his hermitage in Calabria, near the end of his life, he wrote to his old friend Raoul le Verd at Reims asking him to send a copy of the Life of Saint Remi — "because it is impossible to find a copy where we are." The founder of the Carthusians kept, to the end, the devotion to the apostle of the Franks he had learned at Reims.
