Grande munus

Icon of Saints Methodius and Cyril, Bucharest, 19th century.

The encyclical Grande munus ("great task") of Pope Leo XIII. was published on September 30, 1880 and is dedicated to Saints Cyril and Methodius, the apostles of the Slavs.

With this encyclical , Pope Leo XIII extended the veneration of the brothers Cyril and Methodius extended to the entire Catholic Church. He paid tribute to the brothers who had been venerated in the Slavic region up to then and described their work again. He underlined the missionary work as well as the problems connected with it and remembered the imprisonment of Cyril and Methodius and their strong resistance against the authorities.

Leo XIII. In honor of these missionaries, he introduced Old Church Slavonic as a fourth church language alongside Latin , Greek and Hebrew . He concluded by stating that the feast of these saints should be celebrated throughout the Catholic Church.

literature

• Personen Lexikon 1 (AL) , Harenberg Kommunikation, Dortmund, 1983, ISBN 3-88379-018-4
• Lexicon of the Saints , Weltbild publishing group, Augsburg, 2005, ISBN 3-8289-4980-0

Web links

• Text of the encyclical
• St. Cyrillus
• St. Methodius