Maurice de Sully

He also converted the synagogue that stood on the site of the now Église de la Madeleine when it was seized by Philip II of France from the Jews of Paris in 1182, and duly consecrated it as a church dedicated to Mary Magdalene.

Maurice de Sully also rebuilt the episcopal palace in which the nobility and clergy met in 1179 at the coronation of Philip Augustus as joint ruler with his father Louis VII.

He enjoyed in a high degree the confidence of both rulers, accompanied Louis to his meeting with Frederick Barbarossa at Saint-Jean-de-Losne in 1162, and was one of the guardians of the royal treasury during the Third Crusade (1190).

He forbade the celebration of the feast of the Immaculate Conception in his diocese, but is said to have strongly supported by appeals to the Bible (Job, xix, 25-27) the doctrine of the resurrection of bodies, against some sceptical noblemen.

The French sermons do not seem to be in their present form the original work of Maurice de Sully; they are more commonly considered as reproductions made by ecclesiastics from his Latin collection.