Juliana also petitioned the learned Dominican Hugh of St-Cher, and Robert de Thorete, Bishop of Liège. At that time bishops could order feasts in their dioceses, so Bishop Robert ordered in 1246 a celebration of Corpus Christi to be held in the diocese each year thereafter on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday.[14][15][16] The first such celebration occurred at St Martin’s Church in the city that same year.
Hugh of St-Cher travelled to Liège as Cardinal-Legate in 1251 and, finding that the feast was not being observed, reinstated it. In the following year, he established the feast for his whole jurisdiction (Germany, Dacia, Bohemia, and Moravia), to be celebrated on the Thursday after the Octave of Trinity (one week later than had been indicated for Liège), but with a certain elasticity, for he granted an indulgence for all who confessed their sins and attended church “on a date and in a place where [the feast] was celebrated”.[17]
Jacques Pantaléon of Troyes was also won over to the cause of the Feast of Corpus Christi during his ministry as Archdeacon in Liège under the diocesan bishop Robert of Thourotte. It was he who, having become Pope as Urban IV in 1264, instituted the Solemnity of Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Pentecost as a feast for the entire Latin Church, by the papal bull Transiturus de hoc mundo.[10][17] The legend that this act was inspired by a procession to Orvieto in 1263, after a priest Peter of Prague[18] and his congregation witnessed a Eucharistic miracle of a bleeding consecrated host at Bolsena,[16] has been called into question by scholars who note problems in the dating of the miracle, whose tradition begins in the 14th century, and the interests of Urban IV, a former Archdeacon in Liège.[citation needed]
Though this was the first papally imposed universal feast for the Latin Church,[19] it was not widely celebrated for half a century. It was adopted by a number of dioceses in Germany and by the Cistercians, and in 1295 was celebrated in Venice.[20] It became a truly universal feast only after the bull of Urban IV was included in the collection of laws known as the Clementines, compiled under Pope Clement V, but promulgated only by his successor Pope John XXII in 1317.[20][21]
