Feast day: February 28

St. Oswald of Worcester

Bishop · d. 992

Patron of —

A leading reformer of the English Church in the tenth century, archbishop of York and bishop of Worcester, who renewed monastic life and cared for the poor.

Oswald was a tenth-century English bishop of Danish descent, a nephew of an Archbishop of Canterbury, who as a young man trained as a monk in the reformed Benedictine abbey of Fleury in France. He returned to England steeped in the ideals of monastic renewal then sweeping the Continent.

With King Edgar and his fellow reformers St. Dunstan and St. Ethelwold, Oswald became a leader of the great tenth-century revival of English monastic life. Made bishop of Worcester in 961 and archbishop of York in 972, he replaced lax communities of secular clergy with disciplined monks.

He founded and restored numerous monasteries — most famously Ramsey, which became a renowned centre of learning — and used his double office to spread the reform across the north and midlands of England.

A man of notable gentleness and charity, Oswald made a habit each Lent of washing the feet of twelve poor men daily; he died in 992 in the very act of doing so. He was venerated as a saint, one of the architects of monastic England.

By tradition he died washing the feet of the poor, as he did every day of Lent — kneeling at the twelfth pair when his heart gave out.

Image: AnonymousUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/11348b.htm