The life of St Methodius, Enlightener of the Slavs
The Pope consecrated him and sent him back to that work, but the region's German clergy, hostile to a liturgy celebrated in the Slavonic tongue rather than Latin, had him seized and held prisoner for roughly three years before Pope John VIII stepped in to win his release and restore him as Archbishop of Moravia.
Even freed, Methodius found no real rest: the same German clergy kept contesting his authority and his use of Slavonic worship for the rest of his years there. Sensing that his own death was drawing near, he chose his student Gorazd to succeed him, and, having foretold the very day it would happen, died on April 6, 885, at roughly sixty years old.
He is remembered, with his brother, as Equal to the Apostles and enlightener of the Slavic peoples, the second half of a mission that outlasted the man who began it alongside him.
