St. Willibald

Willibald comes to us first as one of the great pilgrim saints and only later as bishop and organizer. As a child he was dedicated to God after a desperate illness, and from there his life moved outward through an extraordinary journey. He left England with his father and brother, spent time in Rome, survived sickness, and then went on to the Holy Land, Cyprus, Syria, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Jordan, the monasteries and hermitages of the East, and finally Constantinople before returning west. This was not mere wandering. Willibald was learning the universal Church with his own eyes.

The next long stretch at Monte Cassino gave the story a different tone: stability, observance, and the deep monastic spirit. Then came the third movement of his life, when Pope Gregory III sent him to Germany to join St. Boniface. Ordained priest and then bishop of Eichstatt, Willibald helped shape a new missionary church in Franconia. Both the hard labor of the task and its practical fruit deserve notice: the organization of the diocese, the founding at Heidenheim where his brother Winebald and sister Walburga also labored, and his long pastoral care over a people who had once been spiritually barren. The life is not dramatic in the same way as Boniface's, but it is wide-ranging and deeply faithful.