St Leo the Great, Pope of Rome

Saints commemorated

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  St Leo the Great, Pope of Rome

  Leo the Great (c. 400 – 461) was Pope of Rome from 440 to 461, one of the greatest of the Roman pontiffs and a Father of the whole Church. Against the Monophysite teaching of Eutyches he set out, in his Tome — the dogmatic letter to Flavian of Constantinople — the confession of the one Christ in two natures, divine and human, united in one person without confusion or division; and when that letter was read at the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451, the Fathers acclaimed it as the faith of the Apostles: "Peter has spoken through Leo." A tireless pastor and preacher, he defended the Roman flock against Manichaeans and Priscillianists, upheld the order of the Church, and in 452 went out to meet Attila the Hun at the river Mincio and turned him back from Italy; three years later he wrung from the Vandal Genseric the sparing of Rome's people from the sword. He reposed on 10 November 461, the first pope the Church has called "the Great." The Orthodox Church keeps him on February 18 as a pillar of the Chalcedonian faith.

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• Agapitus of Synnada

  Agapitus (4th century) was a confessor and wonderworker, bishop of Synnada in Phrygia. Born in Cappadocia of devout parents in the last years of the pagan empire, he entered a monastery in his youth and became renowned for a gift of miracles — the healing of the sick and the casting-out of demons. Conscripted into the army under the emperor Licinius, he confessed Christ openly amid the persecution, was wounded but preserved unhurt, and comforted the martyrs who suffered beside him. After the victory of Constantine the Great, whose ailing servant he healed, he asked only to return to the monastic life; ordained priest and then chosen bishop of Synnada, he shepherded his flock and wrought many wonders, and reposed in peace. He is commemorated on February 18.

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• Cosmas of Yakhroma

  Cosmas of Yakhroma (†1492) was a Russian monastic saint, founder and abbot of the Dormition monastery on the river Yakhroma near Vladimir. As a young man, servant to an ailing nobleman, he found by the Yakhroma river an icon of the Dormition of the Mother of God shining in a tree, and at its discovery his master was healed. Bidden by a heavenly voice to become a monk and to build a monastery, he took the icon and entered the Kiev Caves Lavra; and, later directed by an angel, he returned to the place of the vision and there raised a church and gathered a brotherhood, of which he became abbot. He lived in ascetic labour and was granted the gift of wonders, and reposed in old age on February 18, 1492. The image he found is venerated as the Yakhroma Icon of the Mother of God.

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• Flavian of Constantinople

  Flavian (died 449) was Archbishop of Constantinople from 446, a defender of the apostolic faith against the heresy of the archimandrite Eutyches, who taught that in Christ there was but one nature after the Incarnation. At a synod in Constantinople in 448 Flavian condemned and deposed Eutyches; but at the "Robber Council" (Latrocinium) of Ephesus in 449 — dominated by Dioscorus of Alexandria and the emperor's officials — Eutyches was restored and Flavian himself anathematised, deposed, and so brutally handled that he died of his injuries a few days later, on the road into exile. Two years afterward the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451) vindicated his faith, condemned Eutyches, received the Tome of Pope Leo, and acclaimed Flavian a saint and martyr. The Church keeps him as Flavian the Confessor.

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• Leo and Paregorius

  Leo and Paregorius were two friends and fellow-Christians martyred at Patara in Lycia, most likely in the persecution under Valerian about the year 260. Paregorius suffered first, giving his life for Christ under torture. Leo, who had longed to share his friend's contest, was moved to zeal at a pagan festival: passing the shrine of the city's idols where lamps burned before the images, he cast them down and put them out. Seized and brought before the governor, he refused again and again to sacrifice, endured scourging and interrogation, and was condemned to be dragged over the rough ground to a torrent and there put to death, his body cast into a pit. He thus followed Paregorius to the crown. The two are commemorated together on February 18.

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• Piama

  Piama (Piamun) was an Egyptian virgin of the fourth century, known from the Lausiac History of Palladius. She lived quietly with her widowed mother in a Nile village, spinning flax and eating only in the evening, and was granted the gift of foresight and prophecy. When the men of a neighbouring village came in arms to attack her own over the sharing of the Nile flood-waters, she foresaw it, warned her neighbours in vain, and then spent the night in prayer; the attackers were held fast, unable to move, until they sent to beg her village for peace and she prayed for their release. She reposed in peace. Her memory is kept on February 18.

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British Isles and Ireland

• Venerable Colman, bishop of Lindisfarne (676)
• St. Ethelina of Gloucestershire

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