Feast day: February 14
Sts. Cyril & Methodius
Greek brothers who evangelized the Slavs in their own language, inventing an alphabet to translate the Scriptures.
Cyril and Methodius were brothers, born in the early ninth century at Thessalonica, a Greek city on the edge of the Slavic world, into a noble family. Both were learned and devout; Cyril, the younger, was a brilliant scholar and philosopher at Constantinople, while Methodius served as a governor before becoming a monk. Their knowledge of the Slavic tongue, learned in their youth, would shape the rest of their lives.
In 863 a Slavic prince of Moravia, in central Europe, asked the emperor for missionaries who could teach his people in their own language, and the two brothers were chosen. To carry out the work, Cyril did something of lasting genius: he devised an alphabet capable of capturing the sounds of the Slavic language — the ancestor of the Cyrillic script that still bears his name — and the brothers translated the Gospels and the books of the liturgy into Slavonic.
This was a bold and controversial step. At a time when worship in the West was conducted almost everywhere in Latin, the brothers insisted on giving the Slavic peoples the Scriptures and the Mass in a tongue they could understand. German clergy in the region opposed them bitterly, and the brothers traveled to Rome to defend their work — where the pope approved the Slavonic liturgy and blessed their mission.
Cyril died in Rome in 869, having become a monk shortly before the end; Methodius was made an archbishop and returned to continue the mission among the Slavs, enduring opposition and even imprisonment until his death in 885. Together they laid the foundations of Slavic Christianity and literature, and in modern times they were named, with St. Benedict, co-patrons of Europe.
The Cyrillic alphabet used today by 250+ million people is named for Cyril — a missionary side project that outlived empires.
Image: painted by Zahari Zograf (Захарий Христович Димитров) (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/04592a.htm
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