SAINT BEDE THE VENERABLE
Priest and Doctor of the Church
(673-735)

        Venerable Bede is a saint from the Anglo-Saxon Church and the first English historian. At 7 years old, he was consecrated to God and entrusted to the care of St. Benedict Biscop in Wearmouth. He became a monk in the sister-house of Jarrow and trained no less than six hundred scholars.

        To the toils of teaching and the exact observance of his rule, Bede added long hours of private prayer and study. He was familiar with Latin, Greek and Hebrew. In the treatise that he compiled for his scholars, he put together all that the world had stored in history, chronology, physics, music, philosophy, poetry, arithmetic and medicine. In his Ecclesiastical History, he recorded the lives of Anglo-Saxon Saints and Holy Fathers, and his commentaries on Holy Scripture are still in use by the Church. He is generally accepted as the father of English history.

        Venerable Bede translated the Gospel of St. John from Greek up to the hour of his death on Ascension Day, 735. "He spent that day joyfully," writes one of his scholars. After his attendant had written one last sentence, he said, "Consummatum est. Take my head and face me toward the old praying-place..." Laying on the floor, he sang, "Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost," and breathed his last. His translations of Sacred Scripture spread Christendom throughout England. He was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIII in 1899.