St. Bede the Venerable

May 25 is the feast of St. Bede the Venerable (c. 672-735), the English Benedictine monk and Doctor of the Church. Born in the kingdom of Northumbria, he was given to the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow at the age of seven, was ordained deacon at nineteen and priest at thirty, and spent the rest of his life in the monastery, teaching, writing, and praying the liturgy. He never travelled outside Northumbria.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) is the foundation of English history — the source for the conversion of England by Augustine of Canterbury and the Celtic missions, the lives of the early Anglo-Saxon kings and saints, and the Synod of Whitby (664). His biblical commentaries, based on the Latin fathers, were the standard textbooks of the early medieval West. He popularized the dating "AD" — Anno Domini, the year of the Lord — which he used throughout his work, and which spread through the West from his pen.

Bede died at Jarrow on May 25, 735, completing a translation of the Gospel of John on his deathbed. His body was translated to Durham in 1020, where it lies in the Galilee Chapel of the cathedral. He was proclaimed Doctor of the Church in 1899 by Pope Leo XIII — the only Englishman so honoured. From Durham, where he is buried, to Lindisfarne, whose gospels he recorded, the May 25 feast is the feast of the English doctor.