This week, February 14, the Catholic Church celebrated the liturgical memory of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, co-patrons of Europe.
Newsroom (18/02/2022 09:33, Gaudium Press) To commemorate of the eleventh centennial of the two saints’ work of evangelization, Blessed John Paul II, published the Encyclical Letter “Slavorum Apostoli”, dated June 2, 1985. It contained many highlights of their lives.
Celebrating their feast on February 14th, the anniversary of St. Cyril’s death was not always the case. Prior to Vatican II it remained on July 7th, the day Pope Leo XII set for the pair of brothers.
The beginnings of a vocation
The brothers were born in the city of Thessaloniki in the middle of the 9th century. Methodius was most likely given the baptismal name Michael. The elder of the brothers was born between 815 and 820. Constantine, better known by his religious name, Cyril, was the youngest, having been born around the year 827 or 828.
Their father held a high position in the imperial administration, and family conditions opened the brothers to the prospect of an analogous career. Methodius even held the post of archdeacon, that is, the representative of one of the border provinces, where many Slavs lived. However, in 840, he abandoned his career to retire to one of the monasteries located at the foot of Mount Olympus in Bithynia, known as the Sacred Mountain.
Cyril completed his studies in Byzantium, where, after refusing a brilliant political career, he received holy orders. While still a young man, he became secretary to the Patriarch of Constantinople and librarian of the Archives attached to the great church of St. Sophia in the same city.
Wishing to devote himself more to study and the contemplative life, he secretly took refuge in a monastery on the shores of the Black Sea. After six months, he was discovered and persuaded to accept the teaching of philosophical subjects at the Constantinople High School, which earned him the epithet Philosopher, for which he is still known today. After having good success in a mission with the Saracens, he withdrew from public life and joined his older brother, to share the monastic life with him.
Mission in Moravia
Prince Ratislaus of Great Moravia sent a petition to Emperor Michael III to send his people a bishop and teacher who would be able to explain the true Christian faith to them in their language.
St. Cyril and St. Methodius were chosen for the mission, and they accepted it readily. Around the year 863 they arrived in Great Moravia, a state comprising several Slavic populations of Central Europe, at the crossroads of reciprocal influences between East and West.
There they undertook the mission for which they had been sent. Soon they realized that the sacred texts (including Holy Scripture and indispensable for the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy) would need to be translated. Cyril set to work creating a new alphabet that adapted well to the phonetics of the Paleoeslav language. After the work was completed, the translated works were sent off for papal approval.
Pope Hadrian II approved the Slavonic liturgical books and ordered them to be solemnly laid on the altar in the church of Santa Maria ad Praesepe, now known as Santa Maria Maggiore, and ordered the disciples who accompanied the two missionaries to be ordained.
Death of St. Cyril and Imprisonment of St. Methodius
Shortly after this honour while still in Rome, St. Cyril fell seriously ill. Taking his religious vows and endowed with the monastic habit on February 14, 869, he gave his soul to God.
His last words were addressed to his brother Methodius: “My brother, we shared the same fate, plowing the same furrow; now I am going to fall in the field at the end of my journey. I know that you love your Mountain very much; but behold, do not abandon your teaching activity to return to the Mountain. Indeed, where could you better attain your salvation?”
Methodius was consecrated bishop of the ancient Diocese of Pannomia and appointed Pontifical Legate “ad gentes” (for the Slavic Gentiles), as well as receiving the ecclesiastical title of the Episcopal See of Sirmio, which had been restored.
His pastoral activities were interrupted because he was unjustly accused of having invaded another’s episcopal jurisdiction, which earned him two years in prison, but he was released through the personal intervention of Pope John VIII. The new sovereign of Great Moravia, Prince Swatopluk, was opposed to the Slavic liturgy, and insinuated doubts about the orthodoxy of the new Archbishop in Rome.
Pontifical Approval
Summoned ad limina Apostolorum in 880 to present the whole matter to John VIII, Methodius was absolved and obtained from the Pope the publication of the Bull Industriae tuae, with which the pope restored in their substance the prerogatives recognized to the Slavic liturgy by his predecessor Hadrian II.
Back in Constantinople, Methodius obtained similar recognition from the Byzantine emperor and from the patriarch Photius, who was then in full communion with Rome. He dedicated the last years of his life to new translations of the Holy Scripture, of the liturgical books, of the works of the Church Fathers, and also of the collection of Byzantine ecclesiastical and civil laws called Nomocanon.
Death of St. Methodius
Methodius died on April 6, 885, having previously named his disciple Gorazd as his successor. His wake was attended by men and women, simple and powerful people, rich and poor, free men and slaves, widows and orphans, foreigners and locals, healthy and sick, constituting a crowd that, with tears and (funeral) songs, accompanied to the burial place the good master and shepherd, who had become all things to all, to save all. Blessed John Paul II on December 31, 1980, with the Apostolic Letter Egregiae virtutis, proclaimed them co-patron saints of Europe. (EPC)
