Richard of Chichester

Richard of Chichester was born around 1197 near Droitwich in Worcestershire, the son of a gentry family. Orphaned young, he was offered his brother's estates but refused them, choosing scholarship instead. He studied at Oxford, then traveled to Bologna to master canon law, and returned to Oxford as a teacher of note — eventually serving as the university's chancellor in 1240. His formation under Edmund of Abingdon, later Archbishop of Canterbury, gave him both his theological depth and his entry into high ecclesiastical office, where Edmund appointed him diocesan chancellor. Richard's election as Bishop of Chichester in 1244 set him immediately against the Crown. King Henry III had backed a rival candidate and refused to accept the outcome. Pope Innocent IV intervened, confirming Richard's election and having him consecrated in March 1245. Henry's response was punishing: he seized all the bishopric's properties and issued orders forbidding anyone to house or feed the new bishop. For two years Richard held his see without an estate or a roof of his own, traveling his diocese on foot and sleeping wherever peasants would quietly receive him. Far from retreating into resentment, Richard used those years to reform. He issued comprehensive diocesan statutes governing clerical dress, residence, celibacy, and liturgical practice — standards of rigor unusual in an age when comfortable ecclesiastical negligence was common. His personal discipline matched his demands on others: he was vegetarian, wore a hair-shirt, and kept a frugal household throughout his episcopate. When Rome's pressure finally forced Henry to restore the episcopal properties, Richard continued the same austere, itinerant pastoral style. In 1253, at papal command, Richard traveled to Dover to preach a crusade. He died there on April 3 at Maison Dieu — the same date the Church now keeps as his feast. The speed of his canonization was remarkable: Pope Urban IV declared him a saint in 1262 at Viterbo, just nine years after his death, a pace that reflects how settled the judgment of his sanctity already was among the English clergy and the Roman curia alike. Richard is venerated as patron of Sussex and the Diocese of Chichester. His primary symbol is the chalice — tradition holds he dropped one at his ordination without spilling it. The prayer recorded at his deathbed, in which he commended his spirit to Christ and asked only to see, love, and follow him more closely, has been carried by the Church for eight centuries. It became widely known in the twentieth century when Stephen Schwartz drew on its three petitions for 'Day by Day' in the 1971 musical Godspell — though that song is Schwartz's own composition, not Richard's verbatim words.