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Saints commemorated

• Holy Great Martyr and Most Wise Catherine of Alexandria and those with her (305)

• Great Martyr Mercurius (ca. 259)

• Clement of Ohrid

  Clement of Ohrid (c. 840 – 916) was the chief of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, the first bishop of the Slavs to preach, serve and write in the Slavonic tongue, and the founder of the Ohrid Literary School. Driven out of Great Moravia after Methodius's death in 885, he came down into Bulgaria, was set by prince Boris I over the region of Kutmichevitsa in south-western Macedonia, and there in some seven years is said to have taught three and a half thousand pupils, of whom the ablest were ordained. In 893 Tsar Symeon made him bishop of Drembica (Velitsa) — the first Slav to hold a Bulgarian see. He built the monastery of St Panteleimon at Ohrid, wrote the first original body of Slavonic Christian literature — sermons, panegyrics, lives, and hymns — and reposed there on 27 July 916, in a coffin he had made with his own hands. With Naum, Gorazd, Sabbas and Angelar, and with the two brothers themselves, he is one of the Seven Enlighteners of the Slavs, the Sedmochislenitsi.

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• Clement of Rome

  Clement was bishop of Rome at the end of the first century (episcopate c. 92–101) and one of the Apostolic Fathers — the generation taught directly by the Apostles. The tradition makes him a disciple of the Apostle Peter, who is said to have ordained him, and reckons him the third or fourth bishop of the Roman church. His enduring monument is the Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Clement, c. 96), written in the name of the Roman church to quell a schism at Corinth: the earliest datable Christian writing outside the New Testament, and for centuries read aloud in the churches. A later passio relates that Trajan exiled him to the marble quarries of Chersonesus in the Crimea and had him drowned with an anchor about his neck; his relics, recovered there by Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century, were carried in part to Rome and in part to Kyiv. He is commemorated on November 25.

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• Peter of Alexandria

  Peter was archbishop of Alexandria from about 300 until his martyrdom in 311, the last of the great bishop-martyrs of the Egyptian church under the Roman persecutions — the tradition names him "the seal and the completion of the martyrs." Trained in and then head of the famous catechetical school of Alexandria, he governed his church through the fiercest years of the Great Persecution, largely from hiding, and left in his Canonical Epistle the Church's classic measure for restoring those who had lapsed under torture. He was the first to condemn and excommunicate the deacon Arius, before the Arian controversy had fully broken; the tradition tells of his vision of Christ as a boy in a torn robe, warning him not to receive the heretic back. Beheaded at Alexandria on November 25, 311, at the very spot of Saint Mark's martyrdom, he is venerated as a champion of Orthodoxy and a theologian whose writings were still cited at the Ecumenical Councils.

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Readings

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