Badurad of Paderborn

Badurad was bishop of Paderborn from 815 until his death on 17 September 862, in the forty-⁠eighth year of his episcopate. He came from the Saxon nobility and laboured for the deep Christianization of a people only recently brought to the faith. He is venerated as a saint from the end of the ninth century, but our sources give him no feast in the Orthodox calendar. His veneration has remained in the Germanic West, in the local Catholic Church.

Beginnings

He was born in 780 or about 785, in the time of the Saxon wars (772 to 804). The sources do not agree on his family: one says he came from the Saxon nobility, another from the Immedinger clan or the Matto family, a distant relative of Charlemagne. He was educated at the cathedral of Würzburg and trained as a cleric. He succeeded, in 815, the bishop of Paderborn, who died on 9 August of that year, and was the second bishop of the city.

Bishop and trusted man of the emperor

At his request, on 2 April 822, the emperor Louis the Pious granted ecclesiastical immunity to the cathedral of Paderborn. On 25 August of the same year he consecrated the high altar of the abbey of Corvey and gave it its Latin name, Corbeia. In June 829 he took part in the council of Mainz, held in Saint Alban's abbey. He had great trust with the emperor. When Abbot Hilduin of Saint-⁠Denis was sentenced in 830 to internal exile, he was sent to Paderborn. About 832 Louis sent him to Corvey as royal emissary. He remained loyal to Louis in the time of the revolts, and in 834, according to Thegan of Trier, the emperor sent him, as one of three envoys, to negotiate with the rebellious son, Lothar. In 835 he was one of the judges in the trial of Ebbo. On 25 October of the same year he was present at the transfer of the relics of Saint Quentin to the abbey church, under Abbot Hugh.

The relics of Saint Liborius

In 836 he acquired for his church the relics of Saint Liborius, from the diocese of Le Mans. They arrived at Paderborn on 28 May, while the bishop was at the imperial palace of Thionville. At that time the bishops of the two sees concluded "a pact of charity and eternal fraternity". These events are told in the "Translatio sancti Liborii", which shows why he sought relics: the common people had been torn from error with great difficulty and were secretly turning back to certain ancestral superstitions, and the bishop realized that, if he ordered the body of a saint carried there, many of the inhabitants, persuaded by the manifestation of miracles and the grace of healings, would begin to venerate it. At some time he also acquired relics of Saint Landelin, from the diocese of Cambrai. The Translatio shows him as a man of the household of the emperor Louis.

Later years

In June 838 he took part in an imperial assembly at Nijmegen. After Louis's death and the outbreak of civil war he sided with Lothar. In August 840 he took part in the synod of Ingelheim, which rehabilitated Ebbo. Remaining with Lothar, he lost control of his church for a time, and in November 840 Louis the German held an assembly at Paderborn in his absence. Gradually he came to terms with King Louis the German, who visited Paderborn in 840 and 845, and the diocese belonged to his eastern kingdom from 843. In his last years he was less involved in politics, took part in the councils of Mainz in 847 and 852, and Hrabanus Maurus addressed a poem to him. He died on 17 September 862, a day recorded in the necrologies of the cathedral, and was buried, it seems, in the cathedral of Paderborn. He was followed by Luithard. From the end of the ninth century he is venerated as a saint.