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ST JOHN OF BEVERLEY, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR - 7 MAY

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN MAY

Saints celebrated on the 7th of May

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 JOHN OF BEVERLEY, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR 

Saint John of Beverley was born at Harpham, a village in the province of the Deiri, which comprised Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the rest of the kingdom of the Northumbers, on the south side of the Tyne; what lay beyond it being called Bernicia. 

HE MADE GREAT PROGRESS IN LEARNING AND PIETY

An earnest desire of qualifying himself for the service of God, drew him young into Kent, where he made great progress in learning and piety, in the famous school of St Theodorus, the archbishop, under the direction of the holy abbot Adrian. 

HIS RETURN

Afterwards returning into his own country, he pursued the exercises of piety in the monastery of men under St Hilda, at Whitby; till in the beginning of the reign of king Alfred, upon the death of Eata, he was made bishop of Hagulstad, or Hexham. 

THE MIRACULOUS CURE

What time he had to spare from his functions he consecrated to heavenly contemplation; retiring for that purpose into the church-yard of St Michael’s, beyond the river Tyne, about a mile and a half from Hagulstad, especially during the forty days of Lent. He was accustomed to take with him some poor person, whom he served during that time. Once in the beginning of a Lent, he took with him a dumb youth, who never had been able to utter one word, and whose head was covered with hideous scabs and scales, without any hair. The saint caused a mansion to be built for this sick youth within his inclosure, and often admitted him into his own cell. On the second Sunday he made the sign of the cross upon his tongue, and loosed it. Then he taught him to say Gea, which signifies in Saxon Yea, or Yes; then the letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, and afterwards syllables and words. Thus the youth miraculously obtained his speech. Moreover, by the saint’s blessing the remedies prescribed by a physician whom he employed, his head was entirely healed, and became covered with hair. 

HIS SANCTITY

When St Wilfrid returned from banishment, St John yielded up to him the see of Hagulstad: but some time after, upon the death of Bosa, a man of great sanctity and humility, as Bede testifies, he was placed in the archiepiscopal chair of York. 

Venerable Bede, who received the holy orders of deacon and priest from his hands, gives ample testimony to his sanctity; and relates the instantaneous cure of the sick wife of a neighbouring thane or lord, by holy water, and several other miracles performed by him, from the testimony of Bercthun, abbot of Beverley, and Herebald, abbot of Tinmouth, who had been eye-witnesses to several of them. 

FREQUENT RETREATS

St John made frequent retirement his delight, to renew thereby his spirit of devotion, lest the dissipation of exterior employs should extinguish it. He chose for his retreat a monastery, which he had built at Beverley, then a forest, now a market-town, twenty-seven miles from York. This monastery, according to the custom of those times, he erected for the use of both sexes, and put it under the government of his disciple, Bercthun, or Brithun, first abbot of Beverley, then called Endeirwood, or wood of the Deiri. 

HIS HOLY DEATH

In 717, being much broken with age and fatigues, he resigned his bishopric to his chaplain, St Wilfrid the younger, and having ordained him bishop of York, he retired to Beverley, where he spent the remaining four years of his life in the punctual performance of all monastic duties. He died there the death of the just, on May 7, 721. 

His successor governed the see of York fifteen years, was a great lover of the beauty of God’s house, and is named among the saints, April 29. 

HIS INTERCESSION

The monastery of Beverley having been destroyed by the Danes, king Athelstan, who had obtained a great victory over the Scots, by the intercession of St John, founded in his honour, in the same place, a rich collegiate church of canons. King Henry V. attributed to the intercession of this saint the glorious victory of Agincourt, on which occasion a synod, in 1416, ordered his festival to be solemnly kept over all England. 

HIS RELICS

Henschenius the Bollandist, in the second tome of May, has published four books of the miracles wrought at the relics of St John of Beverley, written by eye-witnesses. His sacred bones were honourably translated into the church by Alfric, archbishop of York, in 1037: a feast in honour of which translation was kept at York on October 25. 

On the 13th of September, (not the 24th as Mr. Stevens says,) in 1664, the sexton, digging a grave in the church of Beverley, discovered a vault of freestone, in which was a box of lead, containing several pieces of bones, with some dust, yielding a sweet smell; with inscriptions, by which it appeared that these were the mortal remains of St John of Beverley, as we read in Dugdale’s History of the Collegiate Church of Beverley, who has transcribed them. These relics had been hid in the beginning of the reign of king Edward VI. Dugdale and Stevens testify, that they were all reinterred in the middle-alley of the same church.

Alcuin had an extraordinary devotion to St John of Beverley, and in his poem on the saints of York, published by Thomas Gale, gives a long history of the miracles wrought by him from verse 1085 to 1215. Rabanus Maurus has placed Alcuin in his Martyrology on May 19, and Henschenius on that day gives his life, and mentions several private Martyrologies in which his name is found, though he has never been anywhere honoured in the office of the Church. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)

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