Apostles to the Slavs
by Mike Oettle
AS the Serbians
made war against the Croatians and Bosnians a decade ago, it must have been
especially sad for Saints Cyril and Methodius to see, for it was their
mission work 11 centuries ago that made Christians of the Slavic tribes of the
Danube. Somewhere the gospel message has got lost in the Balkan peninsula.
The gospel had been preached before in at least some of the lands of the Danube before these two appeared on the scene – we know of St Martin’s work in Pannonia (now Hungary) and Illyricum (until relatively recently the western parts of Yugoslavia) in the 4th century AD – but as in other parts of the Roman world (such as Britain), pagan tribes had invaded and eliminated the Church. A Slavic principality called Great Moravia had emerged in the lands we today call Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary (the Magyars had not yet arrived in Central Europe) and in 862 its ruler, Rostislav, found himself under pressure from both the German kingdom and the Roman Church in Germany, as well as from another Slavic state, the Bulgarian Empire.
Rostislav appealed to Constantinople for help and for missionaries. The Emperor, Michael III, and the Patriarch, Photius, agreed that Cyril[1] and Methodius were the men to evangelise the Slavs. Cyril, born about 827, a former professor of philosophy and previously a missionary to the Arabs, and his brother, Abbot Methodius, born about 825, were engaged in a mission among the Khazars, north-east of the Black Sea, but were obedient to the call and in 862 began work among the Slavs.
Their first work was to translate the Scriptures and liturgy into Slavonic (the common language of the tribes from Bulgaria to Great Moravia), and to do this they had to devise (from the Greek) an alphabet that would reflect the sounds of the Slavonic tongue (today called Old Church Slavonic). It is believed that Methodius devised the alphabet, but credit is given to Cyril in the name Cyrillic. The Cyrillic alphabet is no longer used in its original form, but adapted versions of it are still used in Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia and can be seen on the stamps issued by these countries, by Yugoslavia and by the former Soviet Union.
In 867 the brothers were invited to Rome by Pope St Nicholas I to explain their conflict with the German archbishop of Salzburg (now in Austria) and bishop of Passau (in Bavaria), who wanted to control the area where they were operating and enforce the Latin liturgy. By the time they arrived in Rome in 868, a new Pope, Adrian II, had been installed. He took their side and formally authorised the Slavonic liturgy. Cyril died in Rome, but Adrian made Methodius Archbishop of Sirmium (a city on the southern border of Pannonia) and papal legate.
After
Rostislav’s death his successor, Svatopluk, allowed the Germans more leeway
and in 870 Methodius was tried by the German clergy, brutally treated and
jailed until Pope John VIII intervened. In 880 Methodius was again summoned to
Rome over the Slavic liturgy, but once more obtained papal approval, this time
with difficulty. Further trouble, led by his suffragan, Wiching, forced
Methodius to visit Constantinople in 882.
Wiching succeeded Methodius after his death in 884, and now Rome gained the upper hand. Pope Stephen V forbade the use of Slavic liturgy and Wiching exiled the disciples of Cyril and Methodius. These disciples continued their work among the Serbs, Croats, Poles and Bulgars and even took the gospel to Kiev, then capital of Russia. But the Latin-Slavonic divide caused irreparable damage to both the Church in the Danube lands and the Slavic peoples, especially when, in later years, the Roman Church enforced the Latin rite among the western section, known as Chrvata,[2] of the tribe called Srba.[3] The result is not only the the use of the Roman alphabet among the Catholic Croats but hatred and distrust of the “heretic” Orthodox Serbians, and vice versa.
Cyril and Methodius were canonised
by the Eastern Church soon after their death, and in 1880 they were finally
recognised by Rome as well. Their feast day is on 7 July.
