Feastday: January 4
Death: 743
As archbishop of Reims, France, Rigobert lived in a chamber atop the city gate. While in his room he would pray at a window facing the city’s basilica of Saint Remigius. Desirous to pray frequently in a church closer at hand, Rigobert had a passageway carved through the turret of a church adjoining the city gate, thereby giving him easy access by means of a ladder. He was later unjustly exiled from Reims by the Frankish sovereign Charles Martel. Eventually the archbishop settled in a nearby village. When on one occasion he had been given a live goose to take home for his dinner, Rigobert put the bird in the arms of a servant-boy accompanying him. Along the way, as Rigobert was reciting the divine office, the bird broke free and flew away. The boy deeply grieved this mishap, but Rigobert comforted him, urging him to trust in God. When Rigobert resumed his prayers, the goose flew back to them. Thereafter, the archbishop kept the bird as a pet. The goose would walk with him to a church where, as the tame bird patiently waited for him, he celebrated Mass at an altar dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
For other people named Rigobert, see Rigobert (name).Saint Rigobert (died 743) was a Benedictine monk and later abbot at Orbais who subsequently succeeded Saint Rieul as bishop of Reims in 698.
Rigobert baptized Charles Martel, but Charles afterwards had him brutally driven from the see and replaced, for political reasons, by the warlike and unpriestly Milo, who was already Archbishop of Trier. Rigobert took refuge in Aquitaine and then retired to Gernicourt, in the Diocese of Soissons, where he led a life in the exercises of penance and prayer.
He died about the year 743, and was buried in the church of Saint Peter at Gernicourt, which he had built. Hincmar translated his relics to the abbey of Saint Theodoric, and later, to the church of Saint Dionysius at Reims. Fulk, Hincmar's successor, removed them into the metropolitan Church of Our Lady of Reims, in which the greater part is preserved in a rich shrine, though a portion is kept in the church of Saint Dionysius at Reims, and another portion in the cathedral of Paris, where a chapel bears his name.
His feast day is 4 January.
