Mother of the English - St. Hilda of Whitby

Dcn. Seraphim tells the story of St. Hilda of Whitby: born into the royal house of Northumbria, baptized at Easter beside King Edwin by a missionary from Rome, called back from the very ship that would have carried her to a monastery in Gaul, and formed in the Irish discipline of Aidan. Hilda's own life is the meeting of two streams — Roman water at her baptism, Irish discipline in her vocation — and her great double monastery at Whitby becomes a school that sends five bishops out into a unified English Church. When the most famous synod in English history gathers in her house in 664, the popular story says it was the moment a free Celtic Christianity was crushed beneath the heel of Rome. Drawing on Bede, Dcn. Seraphim tells what actually happened: not a rupture, but the slow beginning of a reconciliation that would take a hundred and fifty years...