St Willibald

Willibald appears first as one of the great pilgrim saints and only later as bishop and organizer. As a child he is dedicated to God after a desperate illness, and from there the life moves outward through an extraordinary journey. He leaves England with his father and brother, spends time in Rome, survives sickness, and then goes 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 life lingers over this because it was not mere wandering. Willibald was learning the universal Church with his own eyes.

The next long stretch at Monte Cassino gives the story a different tone: stability, observance, and the deep monastic spirit. Then comes the third movement of the life, when Pope Gregory III sends him to Germany to join St Boniface. Ordained priest and then bishop of Eichstatt, Willibald helps shape a new missionary church in Franconia. This life notes both the hard labor of the task and the practical fruit: 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.