Today, June 20, is the feast of:
Methodius of Olympus (d. early 4th century?) Apart from his surviving writings, we have little reliable information about the theologian Methodius. Jerome says that he was bishop of Olympus in Lycia (today's village of Cirali in Turkey's Antalya province), that he was later bishop of Tyre, and that he was martyred at Euboean Chalcis in a recent persecution. The information about Methodius' having been bishop of Tyre is unlikely to be correct. That about his having been bishop of Lycia, though repeated by the ecclesiastical historian Socrates, could also be false. But it is widely accepted as factual. The De sectis attributed to Leontius of Byzantium calls Methodius bishop of Patara, a designation subsequently adopted for him in Byzantine synaxaries.
His writings, which are largely in dialogue form, place him in the later third century. Assuming that he was indeed a martyr, he is thus likely to have perished either in the Great Persecution or in the brief later one under Licinius (ca. 320). Learned and cultured, he was for a long time viewed primarily as an opponent of Origen.
It is possible that the Methodius depicted in the upper of the two roundels shown here from the frescoes (1330s) on the triumphal arch of the church of the Hodegetria in the Patriarchate of Peć: http://tinyurl.com/2g2etcp is today's Methodius and not his homonym the sainted patriarch and opponent of Byzantine second iconoclasm. Many of these roundels depict bishops of Constantinople and on this particular side of the arch the roundels immediately above Methodius' depict two patriarchal victims of iconoclast purges. On the other hand, the roundel opposite Methodius' depicts St. Ambrose, like Methodius of Olympus the author of a major patristic work on virginity.
Silverius (d. c537) was a son of Pope Hormisdas. He became a subdeacon, and when Agapitus I died in 536 Silverius succeeded him - named by the Ostrogothic king Theodehad to keep the eastern Roman emperor from appointing someone. Hardly surprising, the Byzantines (especially Theodora) didn't like Silverius, especially after he had refused to recognize the monophysite patriarchs of Constantinople and Antioch. Empress Theodora eventually arranged for his kidnapping and transportation to Lycia; when Justinian heard about it, he ordered Silverius free and returned to Rome. When the East Roman general Belisarius captured Rome, Silverius was accused of treason and deported, but was later sent back to Rome for a proper trial - upon which Vigilius (his Theodora-appointed successor) imprisoned him on the island of Ponza and slowly starved him to death. His cult was confined to local calendars in 1969.
Goban/Gobanus/Gobain of St.-Gobain (d. later 7th century, supposedly) According to his legendary Vita, the Irishman Goban was a disciple of St. Fursey, who ordained him priest. After his ordination he cured a blind man. Somewhat later Jesus Christ appeared to him in a vision and spoke the Latin text of Matthew 25:34, which latter invitation Fursey then took to mean that he and his disciples should leave their homeland and evangelize in Gaul. When they got to the Irish shore (the Vita knows naught of Fursey's stay in Suffolk) a tempest prevented them for three days from taking ship but was finally calmed by Goban as he said Mass. When the party had crossed they went first to Corbie and from there they went on to their several places of missionary endeavor. Goban elected to work in Laon, where he cured two men, one blind and the other deaf. Word of this reached the king, who granted Goban a place in a nearby wilderness for a hermitage. He erected an oratory there, dedicated to St. Peter, and there, after a period of preaching to the people, he was murdered by barbarians more savage than Vandals. He was buried in his oratory, miracles occurred, and a cult arose. Goban is the eponym of today's Saint-Gobain (Aisne) in Picardy.
Bagnus/Bain (d. c710) was a disciple of St. Wandregisilus, a monk of Fontenelle. He was named bishop of Therouanne in c689 and proved to be a successful missionary in the area around Calai. After 12 years he resigned his see and went back to Fontenelle, where he was elected abbot.
Naum/Nahum of Ochrid (d. 910) is part of the group known as the Seven Apostles of the Slavs (the rest are Cyril and Methodius, Gorazd, Clement the Bulgar, Sabas, and Angelerius). Nahum is supposed to have been a follower of Cyril and Methodius. He worked as a missionary in Macedonia from 893 on, and founded a monastery there in c. 900.
Edward the Martyr (d. 979) was the victim of a succession dispute. He was the son of King Edgar of England and his first wife Aethelflaed. When he was assassinated, it was to the advantage of an anti-monastic party that favored his half brother Aethelred (the "Unready"). So, clearly (at least to the pro-monastic party), Edward was a martyr for church rights.
Adalbert of Magdeburg (d. 981) was a monk at St. Maximin at Trier who also served in the chanceries of the archbishop of Köln and of the emperor Otto I. In 961 he was made a missionary bishop to Russian Slavs against his will but returned from that hostile environment rather quickly after learning that the pro-Christian duchess Olga had been ousted from power by her pagan son – he and his men barely escaped with their lives. After a few more years at court he was named abbot of Weissenburg in Alsace, where he wrote a continuation of the Chronicle of Regino of Prüm. In 968 he was made archbishop of Magdeburg with the understanding that he would missionize among the Sorbs (which he did). He was buried in his cathedral at Magdeburg.
John of Matera (Giovanni de Matera) (d. 1139), the founder of the Pulsanese Benedictine congregation, was born in what was then the southwestern Apulian town of Matera. His Vita is thought to have been the work of the third abbot of his congregation's mother house, Santa Maria di Pulsano on the Gargano peninsula; not altogether surprisingly, it presents him as a gifted, model leader of a reformed, quasi-eremitic monastic community that combined personal austerity with public service in the form of preaching and good works. John is said to have formed his vocation while still a youth and to have entered religion at a monastery at Taranto, where he was put to work tending sheep at an outlying locale. His experience there was not happy. Out of sympathy with the monks because of their fine dining and comforted by an inner Voice miraculously asserting that God was with him, he lit out on a passing boat for parts west. Perhaps too he was insufficiently bilingual, for the places he next went to, Calabria and Sicily, were recently conquered venues of Latin immigration and we are never told of any contact he may have had with people identified as Greeks.
For about a decade John, sustained at times by his inner Voice, moved around as a hermit and preacher in the deep south and in Campania, where enemies got him imprisoned after a report was circulated saying that he had found hidden treasure in a church he rebuilt near his hermitage, thus paving the way for his Petrine release from prison, and where he later joined another latter-day apostle, St. William of Vercelli, in an eremitic community on a mountain near today's Bagnoli Irpino. There he was accused of heresy, so he moved back to Apulia, where he preached for a while at Bari and then went north to the sanctuary of St. Michael on the Gargano and in about 1129 founded his monastery at Pulsano.
During his later career he acquired a reputation as a thaumaturge. His congregation, which spread quickly in the twelfth century both in the south and in Tuscany, initiated his cult shortly after his death. Though Alexander III's confirmation in 1177 of the congregation and its possessions is silent about him, John appears in martyrologies from the twelfth century onward as well as in various Offices.
Sancha (blessed) (d. 1229) was a daughter of King Sancho I of Portugal, born in c1180. From 1216 on she supported and promoted the first Franciscans and Dominicans in Portugal. She also founded a Cistercian convent near Coimbra, which she herself entered. Sancha was beatified in 1705.
Benigna of Wrocław (d. 1241?) is a very poorly attested Cistercian saint. Said to have been a nun at Wrocław (perhaps better known to some in its German name form Breslau), she is believed to have suffered martyrdom to protect her faith and her virginity during an invasion of people described as Tatars. The mining town of Svatá Dobrotivá (St. Benigna) in the Czech Republic is said to be named for her and there are still pilgrimages to her shrine modernly.
Or - Benignus of Wroclaw (13th century) was a Cistercian monk at Wroclaw (Poland), killed with many other members of his community when the Mongols invaded.
Margareta Ebner (d. 1351) The South German mystic Margareta came from a wealthy family of Donauwörth. At the age of fifteen she entered the Dominican convent of Maria Medingen at today's Mödingen in Bavaria. Some years later she became very ill, was bedridden for a dozen years, and continued to suffer physically afterwards. During her confinement she began to experience visits from God; at the behest of her confessor, Heinrich of Nördlingen, she kept a journal of these which became her Offenbarungen ("Revelations"). We also have a book of her prayers, the Pater Noster. She is buried in her convent's church. Her cult was confirmed in 1979.
Michelina Metelli of Pesaro (blessed) (d. 1356) Michelina was a noblewoman from Pesaro. She married a duke of Malatesta at the age of 12 and was widowed when 20. When their only child died she became a Franciscan tertiary, converted by a Franciscan tertiary named Syriaca - apparently in such dramatic circumstances that her parents treated her as a lunatic and imprisoned her for a time. Once, when Michelina failed to resist the temptation to eat pork, she beat herself with an iron chain until the blood flowed: she exclaimed to herself, 'Do you still want pork, Michelina? Do you still want pork?' She was released, gave all her possessions to the poor, and spent the rest of her life in vigorous asceticism. Her cult was confirmed in 1737.
Nicholas Cabasilas (d. probably late 14th century) The theologian Nicholas was born into a family of unequal prominence in Thessaloniki in about 1322. His father's family name was Chamaetos but he preferred to be called by that of his mother's family, one of whom, his uncle Nilus Cabasilas, was his early tutor and later succeeded St. Gregory Palamas as metropolitan of Thessaloniki, then the empire's second city. Nicholas finished his education in Constantinople and joined the imperial service under John VI Cantacuzenus. In 1347 he returned to Thessaloniki with Gregory Palamas for the latter's enthronement; when conditions prevented this he spent a year with Gregory at Mt. Athos. In 1353, while apparently still a layman, Nicholas was one of the three nominees for election as patriarch of Constantinople.
In the next year, following the abdication of his imperial patron, Nicholas left government service and entered Constantinople's monastery of St. George of the Mangana. By this time he had written some of his surviving work (e.g. the encomia of Thessaloniki's saints Demetrius and Theodora) but his major writings, the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy and On the Life in Christ, belong to his later career. Recent readers of him have formed the impression that at some time he had been ordained priest. Letters from others to Nicholas cease after 1391. The exact year of his death is unknown.
In 1526 Nicholas was portrayed as a hierarch in the frescoes of the chapel of St. John the Forerunner in the Protaton church on Mt. Athos. More recently it has been asserted that he succeeded his uncle in the see of Thessaloniki. Evidence for that is lacking and it is just possible that his dress in the portrait is a form of honorific. Nicholas was glorified as a saint of the Greek Orthodox church in 1983. Given his theological distance from Roman Catholic orthodoxy, it may be a while before he is permitted to grace the pages of the RM.
Osanna of Mantua (blessed) (d. 1505) was a noblewoman, related to the dukes of Mantua. She had a religious experience at age five, first thought to be an epileptic fit but later realised as religious ecstasy (which continued throughout her life) and took to long periods of prayer, penance, and trances. She refused to marry, but was not professed as a Dominican tertiary (her urgent wish) until she was 51. She was a noted ecstatic, was a trusted advisor of the duke of Mantua, and especially fought injustice around her.
Happy reading,
Terri Morgan
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" Nobility depends not on parentage or place of birth, but on breadth of compassion and of loving-kindness. If we would be noble, let us be greathearted."