Archdiocese of Lyon

The Archdiocese of Lyon (Latin: Archidiœcesis Lugdunensis; French: Archidiocèse de Lyon), formerly the Archdiocese of Lyon–Vienne–Embrun, is a Latin Church metropolitan archdiocese of the Catholic Church in France. It is the oldest diocese in France and one of the oldest in Western Christianity. The archbishops of Lyon hold the honorary title of primates of Gaul. They are traditionally elevated by the pope to the rank of cardinal.

Olivier de Germay was appointed archbishop of Lyon on 22 October 2020. He is assisted by three auxiliary bishops: Patrick Le Gal (since 2009), Loïc Lagadec, and Thierry Brac de La Perrière (both since 2023).

In the Notitia Galliarum of the 5th century, the Roman Provincia Gallia Lugdunensis Prima contained the cities of Metropolis civitas Lugdunensium (Lyon), Civitas Aeduorum (Autun), Civitas Lingonum (Langres), Castrum Cabilonense (Chaâlons-sur-Saône) and Castrum Matisconense (Mâcon).

The confluence of the Rhône and the Saône, where sixty Gallic tribes had erected the altar to Rome and Augustus, was also the centre from which Christianity was propagated throughout Gaul.

The presence at Lyon of numerous Asiatic Christians and their communications with the Orient were likely to arouse the susceptibilities of the Gallo-Romans. A persecution arose under Marcus Aurelius. Its victims at Lyon numbered forty-eight, half of them of Greek origin, half Gallo-Roman, among others Saint Blandina, and Saint Pothinus, first Bishop of Lyon, sent to Gaul by Saint Polycarp about the middle of the 2nd century. The legend according to which Pothinus was sent by Pope Clement I dates from the 12th century and is without foundation.

The "Deacon of Vienne", mentioned in the letter of the faithful of Vienne and Lyon to the Christians of Asia and Phrygia, who was martyred at Lyon during the persecution of 177, was probably a deacon installed at Vienne by the ecclesiastical authority of Lyon. Tradition represents the church of Ainay as erected at the place of their martyrdom. The crypt of Saint Pothinus, under the choir of the church of St. Nizier, was destroyed in 1884. But there still exists at Lyon the purported prison cell of Pothinus, where Anne of Austria, Louis XIV, and Pius VII came to pray, and the crypt of Saint Irenaeus built at the end of the 5th century by Archbishop Patiens, which contains his remains.

Irenaeus sent out missionaries through the Gauls, as local legends of Besançon and of several other cities indicate. There are numerous funerary inscriptions of primitive Christianity in Lyon; the earliest dates from the year 334. Faustinus, bishop in the second half of the 3rd century, wrote to Cyprian of Carthage, who speaks of him in a letter to Pope Stephen I, in 254, regarding the Novatian tendencies of Marcian, Bishop of Arles.

But when Diocletian's new provincial organization (the Tetrarchy) had taken away from Lyon its position as metropolis of the three Gauls, the prestige of Lyon diminished.