Diocese of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne
diocese
The French Roman Catholic diocese of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne (San Giovanni di Moriana in Italian) has since 1966 been effectively suppressed, formally united with the archdiocese of Chambéry. While it has not been suppressed, and is supposed to be on a par with Chambéry and the diocese of Tarentaise, it no longer has a separate bishop or existence.
History
Gregory of Tours's De Gloria Martyrum relates how the church of Maurienne, belonging then to the Diocese of Turin, became a place of pilgrimage, after the holy woman Thigris or Thecla, a native of Valloires, had brought to it as sacred relic from the East a finger of John the Baptist, the same figure which touched Jesus Christ during his baptism. Jacob of Voragine, who is using the work of Gregory, says that the finger of John the Baptist suddenly appeared on the altar of the church at Maurienne, after a Gallic matron earnestly prayed God to give her a relic of the Baptist. Bishop Étienne de Morel (1483–1499) procured for the cathedral a finger of the right hand of Saint Peter. Guntram, King of Burgundy, took from the Lombards in 574 the valleys of Maurienne and Suse, and in 576 founded near the shrine a bishopric, detached from the then Diocese of Turin (in Piedmont, northern Italy), as suffragan of the Archdiocese of Vienne, also comprising the Briançonnais.
Its first bishop was Felmasius, known from a document on the Baptist relic's first miracle. In 599, Gregory the Great failed to make the Merovingian Queen Brunehaut oblige the protests of the Bishop of Turin against this foundation.
Leo III (795-816) made Darantasia (Tarantaise, Loire) a Metropolitan archbishopric with three suffragans, Aosta, Sitten, and Maurienne, but maintained the Ancient primatial status of Vienne.
A letter written by John VIII in 878 acknowledged the claim of Archbishop Teutrannus of Tarantaise that the Bishop of Maurienne was suffragan of Tarentaise, but ordered the archbishop to settle his claim with the Archbishop of Vienne.
The public source identifies “Diocese of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne” as diocese. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Diocese, Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and diocese.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q360645. VIAF identifies the subject as 138033467. Authority coordinates are 45.273, 6.348. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966, 1483 and 1499.
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This entry incorporates text from “Diocese of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.