7 Orthodox Saints of the West Before the Great Schism

The Great Schism of 1054 is usually remembered as the moment East and West parted. But for a thousand years before it there was one Church, and the saints of the Latin West belong to the Orthodox calendar as fully as those of Constantinople or Antioch. In the twentieth century St. John Maximovitch urged the faithful in Western Europe to honor them again, and Orthodox parishes in the West increasingly bear their names. Here are seven. For the history behind the division, see our short history of the Orthodox Church.

1. St. Patrick - the enlightener of Ireland

Feast: March 17

Patrick was a teenage Briton when raiders carried him off to Ireland, where he spent six years as a slave herding flocks and learned to pray a hundred times a day and nearly as often at night. He escaped home, then went back to Ireland as a bishop to preach to the people who had enslaved him. His Confession, one of the few writings we have from his own hand, is a humble and moving account of a life given to God. He reposed in the fifth century, and the Orthodox Church honors him as Equal-to-the-Apostles.

Read the life of St. Patrick →

2. St. Ninian of Whithorn - the apostle of the southern Picts

Feast: September 16

A Briton who, St. Bede tells us, was trained in Rome, Ninian built a church of stone at Whithorn in Galloway around the year 400, a rarity in a land that built in wood, which is why it was remembered as Candida Casa, the White House. From there he preached to the southern Picts. Whithorn became one of the great pilgrimage places of medieval Scotland, and pilgrims, Orthodox among them, still make their way there.

Read the life of St. Ninian →

3. St. Paulinus of Trier - a confessor for the faith of Nicaea

Feast: August 31

Bishop of Trier, then one of the capitals of the Roman Empire, Paulinus was a friend of St. Athanasius, who had spent part of his first exile in the city. When the emperor Constantius II demanded at the Council of Arles in 353 that the bishops condemn Athanasius, Paulinus refused. He was banished to Phrygia, far from his flock, and died there in 358. His relics were later brought home to Trier in Germany, where the church of St. Paulinus still stands.

Read the life of St. Paulinus →

4. St. Rupert of Salzburg - the founder of a city's faith

Feast: March 27

Rupert was a Frankish bishop of Worms who, around the year 700, went east to preach in Bavaria at the invitation of its duke. Among the ruins of the Roman town of Iuvavum he founded the monastery of St. Peter and, for his niece Erentrude, the convent of Nonnberg - both still living communities more than thirteen centuries later. The town that grew up around them became Salzburg, in what is now Austria, and Rupert, who revived the salt works that gave it its name, is honored as its patron.

Read the life of St. Rupert →

5. St. Valentine - two martyrs, neither in February

Feast: July 6 (the presbyter of Rome) and July 30 (the bishop of Interamna)

The Orthodox Church remembers two third-century martyrs named Valentine. St. Valentine the Presbyter cared for persecuted Christians in Rome and was put to death around 269. St. Valentine, Bishop of Interamna, modern Terni in Italy, was known as a healer and was martyred in the same age. The later legend that a Valentine secretly married Christian couples is how the name came to be tied to love.

6. St. Eulogius of Córdoba - priest and martyr in Muslim Spain

Feast: March 11

In ninth-century Córdoba, the capital of the Umayyad emirate, Christians could worship but could not speak against Islam or leave it. Eulogius, a learned priest, wrote the lives and the defense of the Christians executed there in the 850s for confessing Christ openly. When he sheltered Leocritia, a young convert from a Muslim family, he too was arrested, and he was beheaded on March 11, 859. He had been chosen archbishop of Toledo but was never consecrated.

Read the life of St. Eulogius →, and more about the faith in Spain.

7. St. Olivia of Palermo - the virgin martyr of Sicily

Feast: June 10

Olivia's story reaches us mostly through legend: a noble girl of Palermo carried off to North Africa, where she healed the sick and turned many to Christ, lived for a time as a hermit, and was martyred while still young. Sicily never forgot her, and she is one of the patron saints of Palermo. Her memory is a reminder of how closely Greek and Latin Christianity were woven together in southern Italy, where Greek monasteries flourished for centuries.

Read the life of St. Olivia →

Our saints pages also include Blessed Augustine of Hippo, St. Zacharias of Vienne and St. Gregory of Spoleto, with more Western saints to come.

More lists of the saints

• 7 Orthodox Saints Who Brought the Faith to America - from the monks of Kodiak to a wonderworker of San Francisco

• 8 Orthodox Saints of the Twentieth Century - elders of Athos, a holy fool of Tbilisi and a martyr of Auschwitz

• 7 Holy Women of the Orthodox Church - martyrs, a princess, an evangelist and the enlightener of Georgia

• 8 Orthodox Saints Whose Books You Can Still Read - the Church Fathers behind On the Incarnation, the Ladder and the Philokalia

Or browse every saint on our calendar, and read why the Church honors them in the role of saints in Orthodox Christianity.