ST BETTELIN, HERMIT AND CONFESSOR - 9 SEPTEMBER

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN SEPTEMBER

Saints celebrated on the 9th of September

Prayer to the Angels and the Saints

Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.

In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.

Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.

Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.

ST BETTELIN, HERMIT AND CONFESSOR 

Ingulphus, in his history of Croyland, mentions four disciples of Saint Guthlac who led penitential lives in separate cells not far from that of their director:

1. Cissa, a young nobleman lately converted to the faith; 

2. Bettelin [Beorthelm, Beccelin, Bertram], who served St Guthlac, and was of all others most dear to him; 

3. Egbert; 

4. Tatwin. 

After the death of St Guthlac they continued the same anchoretical life in their cells with the leave of abbot Kenulph, and died happily in the same manner of life. Their bodies were burnt with those of the monks and the church, in the ninth century, by the Danes, incensed at finding no treasure in the monastery.

HIS LIFE AS A HERMIT

St Bettelin, patron of the town of Stafford, in which his relics were kept with great veneration, is related by Capgrave to have lived a hermit in the practice of the most austere penance, and of continual prayer, in the forest near Stafford. 

MOST AUSTERE PENANCE

But the legend given us by Capgrave, which is also found in manuscript before his time, is of no authority; it is not impossible but part of the relics of the disciple of St Guthlac, might have been conveyed to Stafford before the plunder and burning of Croyland by the Danes.

Capgrave, as well as Wilson in the first edition of his English Martyrology give his feast on August 12, and in the second on September 29 - Molanus and others on September 9. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)