REIMS
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REIMS
of an armistice; Benolt-Marie Langenieux (1874-
1905), one of tiie most illustrious prelates of the end
of the nineteenth century, who took the initiative
in leading pilgrimages of Christian workmen to the
Holy See, and thus played a part in the great social
movement which culminated in the encyclical
"Rerum novarum". He presided in 1893, as papal
legate, at the Eucharistic Congress in Jerusalem,
when all the Eastern Churches, whether united with
Rome or separated, bore testimony to their faith in
the Eucharist. Ho was the first cardinal to visit
the Holy Land since the Crusades. In 1896 he or-
ganized the festival to celebrate the fourteenth cen-
tenary of the baptism of Clovis.
In the Merovingian period, Reims apparently enjoyed ecclesiastical supremacy over the eleven cities of Soissons, Chalons, Vermand, Arras, Cambrai, Tournai, Senlis, Beauvais, Amiens, Terouanne, and Boulogne; and when St. Remigius detached a part of his own diocese to form that of Laon, it made one more suffragan for Reims. The erection of the Bishopric of Cambrai into an archiepiscopal see by a Bull dated 12 May, 1.559, took from the metropolitan jurisdiction of Reims the Dioceses of Cambrai, Arras, and Tournai. At the same time the See of Terouanne was suppressed, and out of its territory three new dioceses were made: one of them, Boulogne, dependent on Reims; the other two, St. Omer and Ypres, dependent on Ca'nbrai and Mechlin. The archbishops of Reims, legati nati of the Holy See, had, as primates, jurisdiction over the other metropolitans of Gaul. From the time of Louis IV D'Outre-Mer they had been counts. They were entitled to coin money, had their town guard, and levied armies. As soon as a new archbishop was elected he made a visitation of his suffragans; in each city, on the ar- rival of the metropolitan, business was suspend(>d, the people and the clergy, magistrates, even princes, went to meet liim, prisons were thrown open, and exiles were recalled from banishment. The inhabi- tants of Saint-Quentin and Saint- Val6ry were under his judicial jurisdiction, and had to bring tlioir pleas to the archiepiscopal court, of Reims. In 999 a Bull of Sylvester II recognized the right of the archbish- ops of Reims to crown the kings, and, at the corona- tion of Philip I, Archbishop Gervais took advantage of the presence of the papal legates to proclaim once more this right, which right Alexander III, by a Brief of 1179, prohibited any other archbishop from arrogating to himself. Louis VII, at his coronation, raised the Countship of Reims to the rank of a duchy and peerage of the kingdom.
On the tomb of St. Remigius, as built by Arch- bishop Robert de Lenoncourt, there are niched figures representing the twelve peers who carry the symbols of the coronation: on the right, the six spiritual peers — the Archbishop of Reims, who anointed the king; the Bishop-Duke of Laon, who held the sacred ampulla; the Bishop-Duke of Langres, with the sceptre; the Bishop-Count of Beauvais, with the emblazoned surcoat; the Bisliop-Count of Chdlons, with the royal ring; the Bishop-Count of Noyon, with the baldric — and on the left the six temporal peers — the Duke of Burgundy, holding the crown; the Dukes of Guyenne and Normandy, and the Counts of Champagne, Flanders, and Toulouse. The ceremonies of the coronation at Reims presented two characteristic features: the use of the sacred ampulla and the touching for scrofula (king's evil). According to the legend — of which, however, St. Avitus, a witness of the baptism of Clovis, was ignorant in the fifth century, and the first trace of which appears in Hincmar — the holy ampulla was brought by a dove to St . Remigius when he was in the act of crowning Clovis. This ampulla was a small crystal vial, two-thirds full of balm; its superb orna- mentation was added later. It was kejit at Saint-
Remi, in a reliquary which also contained a golden
needle and a silver paten. When needed for a
coronation, the Abbot of Saint-Remi brought it to
the cathedral. The golden needle was used to mix
the balm, taken from the ampulla, with chrism on the
silver paten. The holy ampulla left Reims only once,
when Louis XI, being sick at Plessis-les-Tours in
1483, hoped that an unction from it would cure him.
The authenticity of the sacred ampulla began to be
questioned w-hen Henry IV could not be crowned
at Reims because the Guises occupied Champagne;
on this occasion an ampulla was used which was
preserved at the abbey of Marmoutiers, and which
had cured St. Martin. Jean-Jacques ChifHet, first
physician to Philip IV of Spain, in 1651 wrote a book
expressly to disprove the authenticity of the Reims
ampulla. In 1793 the vial was broken in the public
square of Reims; but a few days before this was
done, a Constitutional parish priest had taken out
some of the balm and put it in a place of safety;
it was from this portion that Charles X was anointed.
The legendary privilege of healing scrofula on the
day of the coronation was supposed to have been
given by St. Remigius to the kings of France and
confirmed to them by St. Marcoul, Abbot of Nanteuil
(d. 552), whose remains rested after the ninth cen-
tury at Corbeny, in the Diocese of Laon — hence
the pilgrimages made by several kings, after their
con.secration, to Corbeny. Louis XIII was the last
king to make this pilgrimage (in 1610); Louis XVI
had the relics of St. Marcoul brought to the Abbey
of Saint-Kemi, so as to avoid going out of Reims.
Louis X\TI1 did not touch for the scrofula, but
Charles X did, the day after his consecration, at the
hospital of Saint-Marcoul, changing the formula,
"Le roi te touche, Dieu te gudrit" (Tlie king touches
thee, God heals thee), to "Le roi te touche, Dieu te
gu^risse" (The king touches thee, may God heal
thee) .
Several of the popes visited Reims. In the early days of the Carlovingian dynasty it was the scene of two famous interviews: between Stephen III and Pepin the Short, and between Leo III and Charle-
