Diocese of Luçon

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The French Roman Catholic diocese of Luçon (ancient Lucionensis) embraces the department of Vendée. It was suppressed by the Concordat of 1801 and annexed to the Diocese of La Rochelle; however, its re-establishment was urged in the Concordat of 11 June 1817 and came into effect in 1821. The diocese of Luçon then comprised the territory of the ancient diocese (minus a few parishes incorporated in the diocese of Nantes) and almost all the former diocese of Maillezais.

The monastery of Luçon was founded in 682 by Ansoald, Bishop of Poitiers, who placed it under the government of St. Philbert (616-684). The latter, being expelled from Jumièges, established the monastery of the Black Benedictines on the Isle of Her (Noirmoutiers), of which Luçon was at first a dependency, probably as a priory. The list of the abbots of Luçon begins about the middle of the eleventh century.

In 1317 Pope John XXII erected the Bishopric of Luçon and among the occupants of the see were:

  • Nicolas Coeur (1441-51), brother of the financier Jacques Cœur
  • Cardinal Jean de Lorraine (1523-4)
  • Cardinal Louis de Bourbon (1524-7)
  • Jacques Duplessis-Richelieu (1584-92)
  • Armand Duplessis-Richelieu, the famous cardinal (1606-23)
  • Nicolas Colbert, brother of the minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, (1661-71)
  • Marie-Charles-Isidore de Mercy (1775-90), who emigrated during the Revolution and known for his instructions sent to his priests
  • René-François Soyer (1821-45), famed for the activity with which, even as a young priest, he had assumed various disguises and, during the most perilous hours of the Revolution exercised his ecclesiastical functions in the suburbs of Poitiers.

Bishop Soyer had for a very short time as his vicar-general the Abbé Affre, who subsequently, as Archbishop of Paris, fell in 1848 on the barricades in an effort to make peace.

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This article incorporates text from the entry Luçon in the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.