The Saints: St. Bede the Venerable

673 - 735 / Feast - May 25

Born in Northumbria, in northern England, Bede was schooled at the Benedictine monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, where he spent the rest of his life as a monk and priest. “Study, teaching and writing have always been my delight,” he wrote. He penned extensive biblical and theological writings, but his fame came as a historian. His most valuable work was “Ecclesiastical History of the English People.” In 836, a Church council at Aachen, Germany, called him the Venerable Bede and Pope Leo XIII declared him a doctor of the church in 1899.