Saint Isidore of Seville

Saint Isidore of Seville was a bishop, a Doctor of the Church, and a great scholar of Visigothic Spain. The successor of his brother, Saint Leander, in the see of Seville, he gathered in his writings the learning of antiquity and handed it on to medieval Europe. The Church commemorates him on April 4.

He was born about 560 into a family that came from Cartagena, perhaps already in Seville, where the family had moved. He lost his father early and was brought up by his elder brother Leander, a monk and later bishop of Seville. The Church also venerates as saints his other brother, Fulgentius, and his sister Florentina. Benedict XVI recalled that Leander, an exacting and austere man, trained him in discipline and persevering study, and that their home had a rich library of pagan and Christian works.

Isidore’s youth fell in troubled times. The Visigoths who ruled Spain were Arians, and he himself knew exile while still a boy. Yet he lived to see the kingdom embrace the Catholic faith, to which Leander greatly contributed. About the year 600 Isidore succeeded his brother in the see of Seville and governed it for about thirty-five years.

As bishop he cared for the education of the clergy and founded in Seville a school for future priests, which is seen as a forerunner of the later seminaries. He presided over councils, among them those of Seville in 619 and of Toledo in 633; they gave the Church in Spain laws and liturgical norms of fundamental importance.

Isidore’s best-known work is the Etymologies, an encyclopedia of the knowledge of his day, from grammar and medicine to theology. It received its final form from the author’s friend Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza, who divided it into twenty books. Throughout the Middle Ages it was used for teaching in the schools of Europe. Isidore also commented on Sacred Scripture, described the liturgy and the offices of the Church, drew up a rule for monks, and wrote a history of the Goths. During the pontificate of John Paul II he was proposed as patron of the internet, though he was never officially named as such.

Benedict XVI recalled that Isidore is considered the last of the Fathers of the Church of Christian antiquity. All his life he felt the tension between the desire for solitude and meditation on the word of God and the duties of a pastor. He taught that the servant of God, imitating Christ, should give himself to contemplation without abandoning the active life, for God is to be loved in contemplation and one’s neighbor in action.

He died in Seville on April 4, 636. As early as 653 a council of Toledo called him an illustrious teacher of his time and the glory of the Catholic Church. He has been venerated as a saint since early times, long before formal canonization processes existed. Since the eleventh century his relics have rested in the basilica that bears his name in León. In 1722 Pope Innocent XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church. In Spain his feast is kept on April 26.