Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne

Saint Aidan was an Irish monk of the monastery on the island of Iona and later the first bishop and abbot of Lindisfarne. He preached the Gospel in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. The Roman Martyrology calls him a man of great gentleness, piety and moderation. The Church remembers him on August 31.

The year and place of his birth are unknown. Almost everything we know about him was handed down by Saint Bede the Venerable in his “Ecclesiastical History of the English People.” According to Bede, Aidan belonged to the community of monks on Iona founded by Saint Columba, and there he received episcopal ordination.

Saint Oswald, who had been baptized in exile, asked the community of Iona for a bishop for his people after he took the throne of Northumbria. Bede relates that the first man sent was too severe and returned without success, and that Aidan remarked that the hearers should first have been given the milk of easier teaching. So he was the one sent. He arrived around 635, and the king gave him the island of Lindisfarne as his see; twice a day the tide cuts it off from the mainland. Aidan spoke little English, so when he preached, the king himself translated his words for his nobles.

He traveled through towns and villages on foot and urged everyone he met to accept the faith or to persevere in it. He gave the gifts of the king and of the wealthy to the poor or used them to ransom people sold into slavery; some of these he educated and ordained priests. When King Oswin gave him a fine horse, Aidan gave it to a beggar, and when the king reproached him, he answered with a question: was that son of a mare dearer to him than that son of God?

Being a monk himself, he brought monks to Lindisfarne and founded a monastery there. Saint Cedd was educated there, and Bede counts his brother, Saint Chad, among Aidan’s disciples. He often visited and instructed Saint Hilda, later abbess at Whitby. He kept Easter according to the reckoning of his homeland, which differed from the Roman one. Bede firmly rejected that reckoning, yet he praised Aidan’s love of peace, his humility, his freedom from anger and greed, and his tenderness toward the afflicted and the poor.

He died on August 31, 651, in the seventeenth year of his episcopate, twelve days after the murder of King Oswin. He fell ill on a royal estate near Bamburgh and breathed his last in a tent set up against the wall of the church, leaning on a beam that propped up the wall. He was buried on Lindisfarne, and later his bones were moved to the new church of Saint Peter.

Aidan lived before canonization processes existed; the Church has venerated him as a saint for centuries. In 1982, celebrating Mass in York, John Paul II recalled Holy Island, that is, Lindisfarne, where Aidan and Cuthbert brought the Catholic faith.