Ruf d'Avignon

Saint Ruf of Avignon, known in French as Ruf d'Avignon or saint Ruf, is venerated in the Catholic Church as the first bishop of Avignon. Almost everything later ages related about his life belongs to medieval legend rather than to sources a historian can control. No contemporary inscription, conciliar signature, or early martyrology entry securely documents a bishop of this name at Avignon in the apostolic or sub-apostolic age. The figure who emerges from the later vitae is a composite: part New Testament namesake, part founding bishop of a Provençal see, and part patron of an important house of regular canons.

Medieval writers identified him with the Rufus whom the Gospel of Mark names as a son of Simon of Cyrene, the passer-by compelled to carry the cross of Jesus, and with the Rufus whom Saint Paul greets in the Epistle to the Romans. On that basis the legend made him a disciple of the apostles, sometimes a companion of Paul, who was sent to preach in Gaul and who organized the first Christian community at Avignon on the Rhône. He is said to have governed that church as its bishop and to have died there. A conventional date of death around the year 200 is repeated in some modern lists of saints, but it has no early attestation and cannot be treated as historical fact. The first bishops of Avignon who can be placed in a genuine historical sequence belong to late antiquity, long after the period in which the legend situates Ruf.

Whatever the truth about the man himself, a church dedicated to Saint Ruf and believed to shelter his relics stood in the suburban area of Avignon by the early eleventh century. In 1039 a group of clerics established there a community that became the Abbey of Saint-Ruf, one of the mother houses of the Canons Regular of Saint Ruf. During the twelfth century those canons founded or reformed numerous priories in the south of France, in Catalonia, and in Portugal, so that the name of Ruf of Avignon travelled with a major current of Gregorian reform. The congregation later moved its chief seat to Valence; the original Avignon house declined, but the dedication and the local cult persisted. Liturgical books and the Roman Martyrology commemorate him on 12 November as the first bishop of Avignon.

Saint Ruf was never canonized by a formal papal process of the kind used in later centuries; his veneration is of the ancient, local type later described as pre-congregation. He is distinct from several other saints named Rufus, including the Roman martyrs Rufus and Zosimus, Saint Rufus of Metz, and Saint Rufus of Capua. Because reliable biographical data are lacking, dates of birth and death, family origin, and the details of any episcopal career remain unknown. What can be affirmed is the existence of a durable medieval cult at Avignon, the importance of the abbey that claimed his relics, and his legendary role as founder of the city's church.