Our father among the saints, Holy Bishop Bosa of York

Today in the Orthodox Church, we commemorate a saintly, humble bishop of our Northumbrian folk, the twice-appointed Bosa Bishop of York, whose life and career are tangled up deeply with the ecclesiastical feud between Saint Wilfrið and Saint Theodore of Tarsus.

Bosa was one of the Benedictine monastic students of Saint Hilda of Whitby, and is mentioned in Saint Bede’s A History of the English Church and People as the Bishop of Dere with his seat at York, appointed by Saint Theodore as part of the division of the eparchy of Northumbria into three separate ecclesiastical sees. (Little wonder Bosa didn’t get along well with Wilfrið at first.) He is mentioned by Bede as a man ‘of singular merit and sanctity… and humility’. But the singular achievement of Saint Bosa is noted later in the History: the education of Saint Acca, bishop of Hexham, in his early youth.

Acca , Wilfrið’s chaplain, who succeeded him as Bishop of the church of Hexham, was a man of great energy, and noble in the sight of God and man. He greatly beautified and enlarged the structure of his church, which was dedicated in honour of blessed Andrew the Apostle. He devoted much care, as he still does, to obtaining relics of the blessed Apostles and martyrs of Christ from various places, and builds altars for their veneration, placed for this purpose in recesses within the walls of his church. He also compiled accounts of their sufferings, and collected books on church matters to form a very complete and excellent library. And he was diligent in providing sacred vessels, lights and similar articles necessary for the furnishing of God’s house.

He also invited a famous singer named Maban, who had been trained by the successors of blessed Pope Gregory’s disciples in Kent, to come and instruct him and his clergy. He retained his services for twelve years, to teach them whatever church music they did not know, and also to restore to their original form any familiar chants that had become imperfect through lapse of time or neglect, for the bishop himself was a singer of great experience.

He was also most learned in the Holy Scriptures, orthodox in his profession of the Catholic Faith, and well acquainted with the rules of church administration. Nor did he cease to maintain all these things until he received the reward of his piety and devotion, for he had been reared and trained from boyhood among the clergy of the most holy Bosa, God’s beloved Bishop of York. He had later come to Bishop Wilfrið in the hope of improving himself, and remained under him continuously until the latter’s death, travelling to Rome with him, and there learning many valuable things about the organisation of Holy Church of which he had known nothing in his own country.

Though this is a hagiographical account of another saint of the Church, the fact that such place is given in this account to the education of Acca under Bosa and Wilfrið – who were, as noted above, not on the best of terms throughout their lives – is a worthy testament to the intelligence, good pædagogy and holiness of both men and their willingness to reconcile with each other toward the end of their lives. Holy Bosa of York, pray to Christ our God to save our souls!