The Feast of St Corbinian

In 1818, the see of Freising was united to that of Munich, and the eleventh bishop to hold the title thus united (from March of 1977 to February of 1982) was Joseph Ratzinger, who was made a cardinal very shortly after his elevation to the episcopacy. One of the elements of his coat of arms as Pope Benedict XVI is a bear with a pack on its back, an element which derives from a legend of St Corbinian. The story is that when the Saint was travelling to Rome, a bear attacked and killed his pack horse; he therefore ordered the bear to take the horse’s place, and the animal thus tamed accompanied him the rest of the way to Rome. (In the pre-Tridentine Missal of Freising, a verse of the Sequence for his Mass reads, “By his order a bear is subdued, and burdened in place of the pack-horse which it killed.”)

In the northern Italian region of the Alto-Adige, in the province of Bolzano, there is a beautiful collegiate church jointly dedicated to St Corbinian and to a Saint named Candidus, and who has given his name to the surrounding town. He is a figure of whom very little is known, apart from the fact that that he was a bishop of Chartres, Corbinian’s native place. The area is so far north within Italy that it was formerly part of the diocese of Freising. Here are pictures taken by Nicola de’ Grandi during his recent visit to that area.

As is so often the case, a church has been built on the site several times, first in 769, then again sometime before the year 1000; the crypt of this second church is seen below. It was then rebuilt again in 1143, but destroyed by a fire in 1200; the current Romanesque structure was consacrated in 1284, and the bell-tower raised between 1320-26.