The choice of this week’s saint is obvious and most people already know something about him. Briefly, he came from a well to do family, he trained as a soldier, fought in a couple of battles/skirmishes, became a monk renowned for his holiness and bedside manner. He gave up the world to live as a hermit but the Church and the King brought him back into public life. However, this doesn’t really explain his huge importance to the North East in general and to Chester-le-Street in particular.
Cuthbert lived at the time when the Church in northern England thought of Ireland as its spiritual centre. It had been evangelised by Irish priests and monks and it kept to Irish traditions and customs. The most obvious difference between the Christians evangelised by missionaries from the Continent was the date of Easter. The result was that a Christian in the Irish tradition could be celebrating Easter while his wife, brought up in the Roman tradition, was still fasting in Lent. There were other differences too.
Cuthbert was well known throughout Lowland Scotland and Northumbria as a disarming missionary, a wise ambassador for the King and the Church and an altogether safe pair of hands. So, when the Synod of Whitby decided that the Church in England should look to Rome where, as the bishops forcibly reminded the Irish contingent, Saints Peter and Paul were buried, instead of Ireland, it was Cuthbert who was given the tricky job of persuading the Church at large to accept the decision. The Irish monks of Lindisfarne went back to Iona leaving a vacuum filled by Cuthbert and his friends.
Cuthbert showed by his example that the monks could give up their local customs and become part of a universal Church without compromising their essential Christianity.
People began to seek out Cuthbert for his advice and guidance so that he had very little time for himself. He decided to live by himself on one of the Farne Islands where at least the tide and the weather would keep people from bothering him. He made the island so much his own that he was able to pass a law (i.e. insist) that the eider ducks nesting there should be protected – possibly the first conservation law anywhere in the world.
Of course, the Church could not allow Cuthbert’s skills to go unused for very long. In 684 he was made Bishop of Lindisfarne but it took an Archbishop, a King and six other bishops to persuade him to take on the job. His fame and political influence did not die with him: if anything, it increased as miracles were attributed to his intercession and people came to pray near his tomb.
When the Vikings raided in 875, Cuthbert’s body had to be moved so that the pilgrimage to his tomb could continue in safety. It was brought to Chester-le-Street where it rested and people came until 995 when marauding Danes forced its removal to Ripon. After a while his remains were taken to Durham where a small church was built to house it until 1104 when it was moved to the new cathedral. In the Middle Ages Cuthbert became a powerful symbol of the special identity of the Durham Palatinate. And even in the Second World War, St. Cuthbert’s mist hid the cathedral from the enemy bombing raids. He really is our saint.
Author: C B Whittle