Saints Cyril and Methodius

(This is from the Pope's General Audience, given Wednesday, June 17.)

Cyril and Methodius were brothers by blood as well as in faith. They have been called the "apostles to the Slavs". Cyril was the youngest of seven children, born to an imperial magistrate in Thessalonica in 826/827. He learned the Slavic language while still a boy. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Constantinople to be educated and to serve as a companion for the young emperor Michael III. Later, having decided against marriage, though a brilliant one had been arranged, he received holy orders and became librarian for the Patriarch of Constantinople. A little later, his desire for solitude led him to embrace the monastic life, but, his intellectual gifts being in demand, he was not allowed such repose, and was called to teach subjects both religious and secular. He fulfilled this task so well that he became known as "the philosopher". At about the same time his brother Michael (born around 815), after serving as an administrator in Macedonia, retired to a monastery on Mount Olympus in Bithynia. He took the name of Methodius (the monastic name had to begin with the same letter as the baptismal name).

Attracted by the example of his brother, Cyril withdrew to the same monastery to meditate and pray, abandoning his life as a teacher. But a few years later (around 861) Cyril was entrusted by the imperial government with a mission to the Khazari who lived around the Azov Sea. They had requested that a learned man be sent to them who could debate with the Hebrews and Saracens. Cyril, accompanied by his brother, went to Crimea and remained there a long time. While there, he learned Hebrew. He also sought out and found the tomb of Pope Clement I, who had died in exile there. When the time came for their return to the empire, they carried with them his precious relics. After they reached Constantinople, the two brothers were sent off once again, this time to Moravia by the Emperor Michael III. The Moravian prince Ratislao had directed a very specific request to him: "From the time when we first repudiated paganism, our people have observed the Christian law, but we do not have a teacher who is able to explain the true faith to us in our own language." The mission would soon prove to be a tremendous success. By translating the liturgy into the Slavic language, the two brothers would gain the confidence and affection of the people.

This, however, stirred up hostility among the Frankish clergy, who had arrived there earlier and considered the territory as under their own ecclesial jurisdiction. To argue the case, the two brothers were summoned to Rome in 867. Stopping in Venice, they became embroiled in a dispute with those who held the "three languages" heresy, as it came to be known. These people held that the only languages appropriate for the praise of God were Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The brothers, of course, had a different view, which they vigorously defended. When they arrived at Rome, Pope Adrian II met them in a formal procession to receive with appropriate dignity and decorum the remains of Pope Clement. The Pope was well aware of the great importance of the brothers' mission. Tensions were already developing between the two halves of the Roman Empire, the western and the eastern, and the Pope envisaged the Slavs, who were very numerous in the territories in between, as a kind of bridge between the two, maintaining the unity of the Christians living on either side. Consequently he did not hesitate to affirm the mission of the two brothers to Moravia, accepting and approving the usage of the Slavic language in the liturgy. The liturgy in Slavic was celebrated in the Basilicas of St. Peter, St. Andrew, and St. Paul.

But while in Rome, Cyril became gravely ill. Sensing the near approach of death, he wanted to consecrate his remaining time to prayer in one of the Greek monasteries in the city (probably at Santa Prassede), where he assumed the monastic name of Cyril (his baptismal name was Constantine). He pleaded with his brother, who had since become a bishop, not to abandon the mission to the Moravians, and to return to that people. Cyril turned to God with this prayer: "Lord my God ... hear my prayer and watch over your faithful flock which you had entrusted to my care ... free them from the heresy of the three languages, gather all into unity and grant to the people you have chosen concord in the true faith and the right confession." He died on February 14, 869.

Faithful to the task imposed on him by his brother, Methodius returned to Moravia the following year (870) and also went on to Pannonia (now Hungary). Here once again he met with a hostile reception from the Frankish clergy, who imprisoned him. Even so, he did not lose heart, and when he was liberated in 873 he devoted himself with great zeal to the organization of the church, seeing to the formation of a group of disciples. It was owing to these disciples that the crisis that burst out following the death of Methodius on April 6, 885 was overcome: imprisoned, some of them were sold as slaves and were brought to Venice, where they were ransomed by an official from Constantinople, who allowed them to return to the lands of the Balkan Slavs. Received in Bulgaria, they were able to continue the mission started by Methodius, spreading the Gospel into the "land of Rus'". God in His mysterious providence had thus availed Himself of their persecution to preserve the work of the sainted brothers.

Cyril was passionate about the writings of St. Gregory Nazianzus, having learned from him the importance of language in the transmission of the Gospel. He introduced his own work of translation with the following solemn invocation: "Listen, all you Slavic peoples, listen to the word that comes from God, the word that nourishes souls, the word that leads to the knowledge of God." In fact, already some years before the request came from the prince of Moravia for a mission to his land, Cyril and his brother Methodius had been actively engaged, together with a group of disciples, in the project of gathering Christian dogmas into books written in Slavic. At that time the need was clearly seen for new written symbols, more closely attuned to the spoken language: thus was born the glagolitic alphabet [l'alfabeto glagolitico], which after modification, became known as the "Cyrilic" alphabet in honor of the one who inspired it. This was a decisive event in the development of Slavic civilization in general. Cyril and Methodius were convinced that a people could not believe they had fully received divine revelation unless they heard it in their own tongue and read it in their own alphabet.

Pope Pius XI, in his apostolic letter Quod Sanctum Cyrillum, said of the two brothers that they were "sons of the East, Byzantines according to their homeland, Greeks by birth, Romans by their mission, Slavs by their apostolic fruit". Their historic role was next officially proclaimed by Pope John Paul II in the apostolic letter Egregiae virtutis viri, where he called them co-patron saints of Europe together with St. Benedict.