Feast day: March 20
St. Cuthbert
The great saint of Northumbria — shepherd, monk, miracle-worker, and reluctant bishop — who loved the wild solitude of the Farne Islands and the sea birds there.
Cuthbert was the best-loved saint of early medieval northern England. Born about 634, he was a shepherd boy in the Scottish borders who, the story goes, saw in a vision the soul of the holy bishop Aidan carried to heaven the very night he died, and resolved to become a monk.
He entered the monastery of Melrose and later Lindisfarne, the island cradle of Northumbrian Christianity, and became famous as a tireless missionary, crossing the wild moors to remote villages to preach, and as a worker of cures and a man of deep prayer. He helped reconcile the Celtic and Roman customs of the English Church after the Synod of Whitby.
Longing for solitude, he withdrew to live as a hermit on the bleak Farne Island, but was eventually called out and, much against his will, made bishop of Lindisfarne. He governed only two years before, sensing death near, he resigned and returned to his island cell, where he died in 687.
Eleven years later his body was found incorrupt, and his shrine became the greatest pilgrimage site of the north. When Viking raids forced the monks to flee Lindisfarne, they carried his coffin with them for generations until it came to rest at Durham, where his relics remain. He is honoured as patron of northern England.
He set up some of the earliest bird-protection laws in the world to guard the eider ducks of the Farne Islands, still called 'Cuddy's ducks.'
Image: Bede (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/04578a.htm
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