Internet saint overlooks BC data center

The Internet has a patron saint - St. Isidore of Seville - and on sunny days, a stained-glass window of his likeness now radiates its multi-colored glow onto Boston College's newly renovated data information systems.

As part of a major upgrade, the BC Data Center has been relocated from the O'Neill Library to St. Clement's Hall in Brighton, which BC acquired as part of a land purchase from the Archdiocese of Boston in 2004.

St. Clement's and its chapel feature many stained-glass windows that BC has preserved.

One window is of St. Isidore, a bishop of Seville around the turn of the sixth and seventh century.

According to Butler's Lives of the Saints, Isidore insisted that "freemen and bondmen" were equal in the eyes of God, a radical idea in 620 A.D. A prolific teacher, the pious pedagogue was sometimes called "The Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages."

Indeed, such is the sweep of one of his scholarly works, the Etymologies, that it's sometimes esteemed as a pioneering prototype of the modern-day database.

Partly for that reason, an advisory group to the Vatican concluded that the learned bishop was the ideal choice to be the patron saint of the Internet, BC said.

And now in St. Clement's Hall, a stained-glass window of St. Isidore sheds its light on BC's relocated data center.

"It's absolutely beautiful," BC spokesman Jack Dunn said of the window. "And it's charm is that the old is illuminating the new."
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)