Today is the feast day of Saint Bede of Jarrow, known as the father of English history and the biographer of Saint Cuthbert. I find that my church lists his feast as the 27th, My guess about this discrepancy:
English-speaking Orthodox-- Greek and Russian emigres and converts in Great Britain and elsewhere in the West-- began to take an interest in celebrating pre-schism Western saints sometime in the early to mid-twentieth Century. Bede's feast would therefore have to have been added to the calendar of Eastern Orthodox churches, and apparently they used the General Roman Calendar 1899-1962 to determine the dates of such commemorations.
My old 1962 Book of Common Prayer (ie, the one followed by the Anglican Church of Canada in 1962) also gives Bede's date as May 27th.
So. I don't know why the Roman church changed his date. Apparently the Anglican Church followed suit at some point. But those Orthodox who have an interest in celebrating Bede and other Western Saints probably could not be bothered, as they have enough Calendar confusion already, some being on the Julian (Old) and others on the Gregorian (New) Calendar.
And now that I have made your head spin with all this calendrical minutiae, I hope you will enjoy the above video about Bede's home monastery, Wearmouth- Jarrow.
Wearmouth-Jarrow was a hugely influential monastery in early Christian Northumbria and beyond. It is now the subject of a bid for a World Heritage Site.
Some more posts about Bede on other blogs today :
Matters Arising
Bishop's Blog
Atonement Online
Posts
Great video. Thanks, Donna.
ReplyDeleteIn the Roman Catholic calendar, May 27th is the feast of St Augustine of Canterbury, who, along with Bede and Cuthbert, is one of the most important of the pre-schism English saints. I imagine that the RC Church has moved the celebration of Bede to the 25th in order to avoid a clash.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Mark, I was wondering if it might be something like that.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the ECUSA is proposing to combine Cuthbert's feast with Aidan's in August.
addendum May 28: interesting, a bit of a spike in the extremely modest readership of this blog in the last 24 hours....and a google blog search for 'Bede' turns up the fact that a number of Catholics at least celebrated him yesterday instead of the 25th.
ReplyDeleteThank you for these links, Matushka. I enjoyed the movie and I'm off to check out the others.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good video, but for someone not familiar with the area, it might not be clear that Wearmouth and Jarrow monasteries are in different towns. St Peter's in Wearmouth, the older of the two, is in Sunderland, on the River Wear (the same river as Durham, where Bede and Cuthbert are buried), while St Paul's in Jarrow is on the River Tyne.
ReplyDeleteBede himself almost certainly came from Sunderland, and would have joined Wearmouth monastery as a child. It's believed that the main scriptorium, where a scholar such as Bede would have worked, was also at Wearmouth.
The people of Sunderland (such as myself!) are very proud of Bede, so I just wanted to add this.