Roman Catholic Diocese of Saint-Pons-de-Thomières

There was the Abbey of St-Pons, founded in 936 by Raymond, Count of Toulouse, who brought there the monks of St-Géraud d'Aurillac.

In the summer of 1317 Pope John XXII began a major reform of the diocesan structure of the Church in the Midi of France, with a view to combatting the Albigensian heresy.

[4] The diocese was extremely small, containing around fifty parishes, scattered around a territory which was almost completely rural.

[10] The convent of women in the suburb of Saint-Magdelaine was also attacked, and though they managed to escape, the buildings were destroyed by the Huguenots.

[11] In 1790 the diocese was suppressed by the National Constituent Assembly of the French government in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

The Constituent Assembly intended that the Church should be brought under control of the State, and therefore it proclaimed that ecclesiastical dioceses should have the same territorial boundaries as the new eighty-three civil 'départements' which had just been created.

The territory of Saint-Pons was subsumed into the new 'departement' and the new diocese of Hérault, with its headquarters at Montpellier, in the 'Metropole des Côtes de la Méditerranée'.

[13] After the signing of the Concordat of 1801 with First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, the diocese of Saint-Pons de Thomières was not revived, but abolished by Pope Pius VII in his bull Qui Christi Domini of 29 November 1801.