Priest Theodoric

Priest Theodoric, called Theodoricus in Latin and Thierry in French, is the sixth-century priest commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on 1 July as a disciple of Saint Remigius of Reims. The martyrological notice locates him in the territory of Reims and identifies him by the clerical rank of priest rather than by episcopal office. Later monastic and hagiographical tradition, which is not contemporary with his lifetime, presents him as a man of local standing who was formed under Remigius, the bishop associated with the baptism of the Frankish king Clovis, and who was ordained to the priesthood. No reliable source preserves a documented year or town of birth; notices that assign a birth around the late fifth century are conjectural and should not be treated as established fact.

After ordination, according to the received account, Theodoric withdrew to a hill known as Mont d'Hor (Mons Hor), a short distance from Reims in what is now the department of Marne in France. There he established a monastic community that became the centre of his cult. The place subsequently took his name and is known as Saint-Thierry. Tradition holds that Remigius visited the house and that Theodoric’s work was that of a resident priest-abbot rather than of a travelling missionary or a diocesan bishop. In his own century the community would not yet have been a Benedictine abbey in the later medieval sense; the Rule of Benedict spread in Gaul only over the following generations, and the house at Mont d'Hor is known to have followed Benedictine observance in the later Middle Ages. Theodoric is therefore best described as a priest and monastic founder of the Merovingian church of Reims, not as a member of a named religious order of the high-medieval type.

The date of his death is given in the martyrological and monastic tradition as 1 July 533. He was buried at the monastery he had founded. A local cult formed around the tomb, the abbey of Saint-Thierry became a recognised house of the diocese of Reims, and his feast remained fixed on 1 July. Because he belongs to the large class of Merovingian saints whose written lives were composed or expanded well after their deaths, anecdotal miracle stories and genealogical details in later vitae cannot be independently verified. What can be stated with caution is that a priest named Theodoric, linked in memory to Remigius, founded a monastery near Reims and was venerated there from the early medieval period. He is not recorded as having married or as having had children, which is consistent with the celibate priestly and monastic life attributed to him. He did not hold the see of Rome, the Coptic patriarchate of Alexandria, or any Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Coptic, or Church of the East patriarchal office.

No ancient or medieval source assigns him a stable list of specialised patronages of places, trades, illnesses, or social groups comparable to those of more widely invoked saints; he is first of all the titular saint of Saint-Thierry. Canonisation in the later papal, congregational sense did not apply to a sixth-century local cult. Other medieval clerics were also named Theodoric, Dietrich, or Thierry, so isolated references that lack a place, century, or link to Remigius and Mont d'Hor cannot be assumed to concern this priest.