Saints Cyril and Methodius

Feast day: February 14^th

Saints Cyril and Methodius were brothers, born in the 1^st century during the Byzantine Empire. They both chose a monastic life, rather than join their father in politics. Due to their status, the brothers were involved in cultural and diplomatic engagements to the Slavic peoples. Cyril was a philosophy professor working alongside Methodius, who was the abbot of a Greek monastery, to convert a group called Khazars, a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes. The Khazars had established a flourishing commercial economy in the southeast of modern Russia.

The brothers were selected by the emperor to serve as missionaries in Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine Empire. They translated the Bible into the local language called Old Church Slavonic and invented the Glagolitic alphabet, a Slavic alphabet based on Greek characters. This did not occur without conflict. Their actions disagreed with the politics of the area because German missionaries were present but had not successfully engaged the Slavic people. Cyril and Methodius encountered the German archbishop of Salzburg and bishop of Passau, who claimed control of the same Slavic territory and wanted to enforce the exclusive use of the Latin liturgy. Cyril and Methodius brought their case for language inclusion to Rome, and to the recently elected Pope Adrian II. Adrian approved the use of the Slavic language in liturgy. During their time in Rome, Cyril died in 869. Adrian sent Methodius back to the Slavic people as archbishop of Sirmium. However, a few years later, he was put on trial and jailed by the German clergy. Pope John VIII liberated him shortly after, and Methodius returned to Rome and obtained more papal approval of his use of the vernacular.

Identity can be so deeply rooted in language. Cyril and Methodius were dedicated to proclaiming the Gospel in a people's native language. Throughout their lives they fought against the political and cultural traditionalists who saw value only in Greek or Latin. Saint John Paul II, in Salvoreum Apostoli (Apostles of the Slavs), said of these two great missionary saints: “The work of evangelization which they carried out as pioneers in territory inhabited by Slavs peoples contains both a model of what today is called “inculturation” or the incarnation of the Gospel in native cultures and also the introduction of these cultures into the life of the Church (SA 21).”

Saints Cyril and Methodius, pray for us.