Methodius

Saint Methodius was born about 815 in Thessalonica, a major port and administrative centre of the Byzantine Empire in Macedonia. His baptismal name was Michael. He was the elder brother of Constantine, who would later take the monastic name Cyril. Their father Leo served as a droungarios, a military official, under the imperial governor of the city. Thessalonica and its hinterland included many Slavic-speaking communities, and the brothers acquired a practical knowledge of a Slavic tongue alongside Greek. Michael followed an administrative path and was appointed archon of a Slavic-inhabited district, an office that gave him firsthand experience of Slavic society before he abandoned public life.

He then entered the monastic life, taking the name Methodius, at a monastery on Mount Olympus in Bithynia in northwestern Asia Minor. His brother Constantine, already known as a scholar, teacher of philosophy, and imperial envoy, later joined him there. In the early 860s the two were sent from Constantinople on a diplomatic and missionary embassy to the Khazars. Soon afterward, Prince Rastislav of Great Moravia asked the Byzantine court for teachers who could explain the Christian faith in the language of his people. Emperor Michael III and Patriarch Photius dispatched Constantine and Methodius. Constantine devised a script, the Glagolitic alphabet, suited to Slavic speech, and together the brothers translated liturgical texts and parts of Scripture into the Slavic literary language now called Old Church Slavonic, thereby founding a vernacular liturgy and a written Slavic Christian culture.

Latin clergy in Central Europe opposed the Slavonic liturgy, arguing that public worship should be confined to Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The brothers went to Rome, where Pope Hadrian II received them, approved their Slavonic books, and had Methodius and several disciples ordained. Constantine fell ill, was tonsured as the monk Cyril, and died in Rome in 869. Methodius was consecrated archbishop for the restored see of Sirmium, with jurisdiction over Pannonia and Moravia, and returned as a papal legate. Bavarian bishops who claimed the same territory imprisoned him for some two and a half years until Pope John VIII secured his release. Methodius continued to defend Slavonic worship. In 880 John VIII, in the letter Industriae tuae, confirmed the use of Slavonic in the liturgy, while directing that the Gospel be read first in Latin.

In his last years Methodius is reported to have finished a Slavonic version of the Bible, apart from the books of Maccabees, together with a nomocanon and other ecclesiastical texts. He died on 6 April 885 in Moravia and was buried in his cathedral church, whose exact site remains uncertain. After his death, under Prince Svatopluk and in the face of Latin opposition, his disciples were expelled from Moravia. Many found refuge in Bulgaria, where they transmitted the Slavonic liturgy and letters; the later Cyrillic script developed in that milieu from the tradition they carried. Methodius and Cyril were honoured as saints in the East from an early period. Pope Leo XIII extended their cult to the whole Catholic Church in 1880, and Pope John Paul II declared them co-patrons of Europe in 1980. Their principal feasts are 14 February in the Roman calendar and 11 May in the Byzantine tradition.