Feastday: July 5Helie de Bourdeille, a Franciscan friar from Agonac, France, was consecrated bishop of Perigueux in 1438. A zealous pastor, he willingly gave penitents all the time they needed to confess to him, even if this meant spending three or four hours with them. Bishop Bourdeille celebrated Mass almost daily, for which he spent two hours in preparation, and afterwards offered a long thanksgiving. In addition, he attended at least one other Mass daily, and as many as four on solemnities. He customarily knelt for all his prayers, except when illness prevented him. In 1468, he was appointed archbishop of Tours. Having already been in the habit of serving meals to the poor at his dinner table before sitting down to take his own dinner, Archbishop Bourdeille expanded this practice in Tours. On ordinary days he fed fifteen paupers, on feast-days twenty-five, and on the major solemnities as many as seventy-two. The archbishop died while uttering the words from Psalm 31 (verse 6) repeated by the dying Christ, "Into your hands I commend my spirit."
Birth: 1423
Death: 1484
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Hélie de Bourdeilles
Hélie de Bourdeilles (ca. 1423, at the castle of Bourdeilles, Périgord – 5 July 1484, at Artannes near Tours) was a French Franciscan, Archbishop of Tours and Cardinal.
Life
He was the son of the viscount Arnaud de Bourdeilles. Having entered the Franciscan Order at an early age, he was only twenty-four when, at the request of Charles VII of France, he was appointed to the See of Périgueux (1447).
During the wars between France and England he was held prisoner for several years by the English, in consequence of his defence of ecclesiastical immunity. In 1468 he was appointed to the Archiepiscopal See of Tours, and in 1483 he was raised to the cardinalate by Pope Sixtus IV. A stanch defender of the rights of the Church against the encroachments of the State, Bourdeilles advocated the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, as may be seen from his treatise, Pro Pragmaticæ Sanctionis Abrogatione (Rome, 1486).
Bourdeilles continued, during his episcopate, to practise religious poverty and was intimate friend of St. Francis of Paula. He is mentioned among the Blessed in the Franciscan Martyrology for 5 July.
He also wrote Libellus in Pragmaticam Sanctionem Gallorum (Rome, 1484); and a Latin defence of Jeanne d'Arc which is attached in manuscript to the process of her rehabilitation.
