What the Church knows of Saint Theodard comes from an early Life associated with the school of Liège and traditionally ascribed to Heriger of Lobbes, and from a later biography by Anselm of Liège. He was born early in the seventh century, about 613 to 618; the German and most widely followed tradition places his birth in the Rhineland near Speyer, while another old tradition brings him from Aquitaine in southern Gaul. His name appears in the sources in many forms — Theodardus, Diethardt, Dodart, Dieter — a sign of how widely his memory spread across the lands between the Meuse and the Rhine.
He attached himself to Saint Remaclus, the missionary abbot who founded the monasteries of Stavelot and Malmedy, and in that austere school Theodard learned the monastic life. When Remaclus was called about the year 653 to the bishopric of Tongeren-Maastricht, Theodard was left in his place, serving as his deputy and then as abbot of the double monastery of Stavelot-Malmedy. He governed the monks in his master's spirit, and there he took charge of the education of a young nobleman's son, Lambert, said to be his nephew or at least his kinsman — a boy who would one day inherit both his see and his martyrdom.
When Remaclus laid down the burden of the episcopate about 660–663 and withdrew to end his days at Stavelot, Theodard was chosen to succeed him as bishop of Maastricht. His biographers describe a man of glad and winning temper who carried out his office with great energy and pastoral care. He built and restored churches, founded monasteries, urged forward the evangelization of a countryside still half pagan, and gave himself to works of charity. He remained a trusted man of affairs as well: as late as 669–670 King Childeric II charged him with surveying the forests granted to the abbeys of Stavelot and Malmedy.
But the goods of his church were being seized. Frankish nobles oppressed and plundered the diocese, and Theodard, unwilling to buy peace at the cost of the poor and of the rights of the Church, resolved to lay the case before the king himself. He set out for the royal court to seek justice from Childeric II. On the road, in the forest of the Bienwald south of Speyer — by a constant tradition near the village of Rülzheim — he was set upon and killed, probably in the year 670, though some place it as late as 672. It has always been believed that the assassins acted at the bidding of the very nobles against whom the bishop was going to complain. Because he died on the road defending the rights of the Church and the goods of the poor, he was venerated as a martyr from the moment of his death; the oldest sources record 10 September as the day, and that remains his feast. He is commonly shown in art with a sword driven through his head.
He was first buried where he fell. His disciple and successor, Saint Lambert — proposed for the see of Maastricht by the dignitaries of Childeric's court — went in person to the region of Speyer to fetch the remains of his master and benefactor, and laid them in the chapel of his own estate at the place that would grow into the city of Liège. There Lambert himself would later be murdered, and there Saint Hubert built the church that received both martyrs and drew the episcopal seat from Maastricht to Liège. In 722 the bones of the holy nun Madelberta were brought to Liège and buried in the shrine of Saint Theodard, a sign of the honor his tomb already commanded.
At the place of his death and first burial near Rülzheim a chapel arose, the "Dieterskirchel," which became one of the oldest pilgrimage sites of the diocese of Speyer and is visited still. His relics at Liège were solemnly elevated and newly enshrined in 1489; they were destroyed all but a few fragments in the time of the French Revolution, and what survives is kept in the cathedral treasury of Liège. When the Dieterskirchel, razed in the nineteenth century, was rebuilt in 1957, relics of the martyr were restored to it. Cardinal Baronius inscribed his name in the Roman Martyrology at its late sixteenth-century revision, and the diocese of Speyer keeps his memory with its own proper liturgical celebration.
Saint Theodard is honored as patron of the city of Maastricht and of drovers and cattle dealers; the treasury of the Basilica of Saint Servatius in Maastricht preserves a reliquary of 1936 showing him with the sword through his head, the earlier one having been lost in the French period. He was long the patron of the town of Thuin, where a collegiate church bore his name until the French annexation, its tower surviving as the town belfry, and churches are dedicated to him at Beringen and Bogaarden in Belgium.
May Saint Theodard, who preferred the justice of God to his own safety, obtain for us the courage to defend the poor and the rights of the Church, and let us imitate today his cheerful, unwearied charity toward those entrusted to us.
