Salvius was born in the sixth century into the powerful Desiderii-Salvi family of southern Gaul, a Gallo-Roman house that gave the Church many bishops in the years when the Roman order was crumbling and the Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms were rising in its place. He was a distant kinsman of Gregory of Tours, who would later write of him, and a relative of Saint Didier (Desiderius) of Cahors. Such families held both civil and religious authority, standing as a bridge between the old Roman population and the new rulers.
He received the education proper to his rank, in law and in the humanities, and practiced as an advocate at Albi; according to Butler he held the first offices of magistracy in the province. But honors did not satisfy him. Longing for retirement and for freedom from everything that impedes an unbroken union with God, he left the courts and embraced the monastic state. His brethren saw in him so clear an example of piety that they chose him for their abbot, and even then he kept himself apart, living in a cell at a distance from the rest, more hermit than superior.
In that cell a violent fever seized him and he lay as one dead, so that all who stood by mourned him. Salvius himself was persuaded ever after that he had truly died and been restored to life by a miracle, and Gregory of Tours recorded in the seventh book of his History of the Franks the testimony he gave on waking: that he had been shown a glory beyond telling and sent back, against his own desire, for the service of the Church. The people of Albi, hearing this witness, judged him a man chosen by God, and about the year 574 he was taken from his solitude and set on the episcopal throne of Albi, the seventh bishop of that see, which tradition traces to the martyr Saint Clarus.
The mitre changed nothing in his manner of life. He remained as austere as in the desert, and he constantly refused the presents pressed upon him; when a gift could not be declined, he distributed the whole of it on the spot among the poor. When the patrician Mommolus carried off a great number of prisoners from Albi, Salvius followed after them and ransomed every one. He was bishop in the days of Guntram, Childebert and Chilperic I, and did not shrink from speaking to kings: he intervened with the powerful Chilperic and drew that prince back from an error he had fallen into concerning the Holy Trinity, preferring the truth of the faith to the favor of the court. Gregory of Tours, who knew him and loved him, has left us the memory of his simplicity and his fearlessness.
In the last years of his episcopate famine and a deadly epidemic fell upon Albi. His friends urged him to spare himself and withdraw; he would not hear of it. Unwearied and undaunted, he went wherever he judged his presence necessary, visiting the sick, comforting the dying, exhorting them to prepare for eternity by such good works as their condition still allowed. Perceiving at last that his own hour had come, he ordered his coffin to be made, changed his clothes, and made ready with edifying fervor to appear before God. He died on 10 September 584, a victim of the plague he had refused to flee.
He was buried in his own monastery, but his relics were afterwards translated to a shrine raised in his honor on the site of the present collegiate church of Saint-Salvi in Albi. That church remained the chief sanctuary of the city until the building of the cathedral of Sainte-Cécile, and newly appointed bishops of Albi came to bow before his tomb before taking up their charge; the sepulchre itself was lost during the reordering of the collegiate church in the eighteenth century. His cult in the city was continuous, and he is venerated as a saint of the Catholic Church, his feast kept on 10 September. He is sometimes confused with Salvius of Amiens, bishop in the same period farther north.
Salvius shows what a Christian does with power: he gave away his standing at the bar, gave away every gift laid in his hands, gave away his safety in the time of plague, and kept only Christ.
May Saint Salvius obtain for us that same freedom from what we own and what we are owed, and let us today give something away for the poor without waiting to be asked.
