Blessed Rostang II de Capre

The following year, Rostang de Capre convene d a provincial council at L'Isle, near Avignon, where eighteen canons were drawn up. The first thirteen are taken from previous councils of the province and relate to the absolution of the excommunicated, pious bequests, perpetual vicars, those who seize the goods of the Church, or those who oppress its liberties. The fourteenth excommunicates those who sell poison to kill someone or to induce abortion, as well as those who give counsel or aid to poisoners or who do not report them to the ordinaries. The fifteenth forbids the export of wheat before the tithe has been collected. The sixteenth forbids temporal lords from forcing churches to pay the ban for their clergy, their servants, or their animals. The seventeenth establishes that baptized children shall be given only a white garment. — An abuse had crept in regarding the baptism of children. According to this abuse, godparents were obliged to give considerable gifts to the children and their mothers, which resulted in the difficulty of finding godparents, causing many children to die without baptism. It is this abuse that the council condemns here, by decreeing that godparents shall give only a white garment to the children they hold at the baptismal font. The eighteenth canon orders the observance of the statutes of previous councils.

On October 11 of that same year, 1288, Bertrand of Baux, Count of Avellino, paid him homage for the castle of Trinquetaille, which Rostang purchased on August 13, 1300. Pope Boniface VII I, who held the merit of the Archbishop of Arles in high regard, charged him, along with Guillaume de Mandagot, Archbishop of Embrun, to accompany Charles, King of S icily and Count of Provence, to Catalonia i n May 1295, and to assist him with his counsel. The two legates succeeded in cementing peace between this prince and King James of Aragon.

The private life of Rostang de Capre was a public lesson in modesty, continence, and piety. Everything that could smack of the luxury of the century was banished from his house. He spent the greater part of the night in prayer, and employed almost all his income to increase the assets of his Church. It is to his munificence that the archbishops of Arles owed the construction o f the castle of Salon and the acquisition of several lands in Mondragon. He founded in his metropolitan church the chapel o f the holy Mary, Jacobé, and Sa lomé. On April 20, 1303, he permitted the erection of the pious confraternity of the Furriers and Tailors, which he placed under the patronage of Our Lady of the Alyscamps.

After approximately seventeen years of episcopacy, Rostang de Capre went to receive in heaven the reward for his labors and virtues. Death took him from his afflicted diocesans on Tuesday, July 23, 1303. Upon learning of his passing, the faithful flocked in crowds to venerate his remains. The garments and linens he had worn were sought after as precious relics. He was interred, according to his wishes, beneath the altar of the chapel he had caused to be erected in honor of the Holy Marys in the Cathedral of Arles, and where his body was discovered when one of his successors, Gaspard du Laurens, consecrated this chapel to the Magi kings.

The name of Rostang de Capre is read in most martyrologies, as well as in the ancient Breviary of Arles, with the title of blessed, on the date of July 23.

It was under the episcopate of Rostang and towards the middle of the year 1290 that the Benedictines of Montmajour, violently expelled by the Antonines from the priory of La Mothe-Saint-Didier or Saint-Antoine de Viennois, returned to Arles bringing with them the precious relics of the patriarch Sa int Anthony, which they deposited with respect in the great church of the abbey of Montmajour. These relics included the entire body of the Saint, with the exception only of a part of an arm which had been detached a little over a century earlier and placed in a separate reliquary for the Church of Vienne.

Rostang de Capre had for his coat of arms: gules, a goat salient argent, surmounted by a fleur-de-lis or. The word Cabra, in Provençal, means goat.

Gallia christiana nova, by Fisquet; and Notes courtesy of the Abbé Trichaud, superior of the Dominicans of Nizon (Vaucluse).

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