Saint of the day online - Thursday, 23rd February, 2017

St. Adrian

St. Adrian was Born in Africa, Adrian became abbot of the monastery at Nerida, near Naples. He declined an appointment as archbishop of Canterbury but accompanied St. Theodore to England when the latter was appointed Archbishop. 

He was twice offered the vacant archbishopric of Canterbury, by Pope Vitalian, but modestly declined the appointment. He first recommended that it should be given to Andrew, a monk belonging to a neighboring monastery who also declined on the plea of advanced years. Then, when the offer was again made to Adrian, he introduced to the pontiff his friend Theodore of Tarsus, who then chanced to be at Rome, and who consented to undertake the charge. Vitalian, however, stipulated that Adrian should accompany the new archbishop to Britain. He gave as his reasons that Adrian, having twice before made a journey into Gaul, knew the road and the mode of traveling.

In another account, also attributed to Bede, in his Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth, it is stated that Adrian was not made abbot till after the resignation of Benedict Biscop, who is made to have accompanied Theodore all the way from Rome, and to have been immediately on their arrival appointed to this place, which he appears to have held for about two years. The facts in the two relations are not perhaps absolutely irreconcilable; but they are strangely dissimilar in manner, and in the circumstances which they respectively notice, to have come from the same pen. 

He died on January 9 in Canterbury, and his tomb soon became famous for the miracles wrought there.