Saturday before Elevation

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Autonomus, Bishop in Italy

  Autonomus (†c. 313) was a bishop in Italy who, when the great persecution broke out under Diocletian, crossed to Bithynia and made the village of Soreoi, near the gulf of Nicomedia, the base of a wide-ranging mission. He evangelised there and in Lycaonia and Isauria, raised a church of the Archangel Michael, and ordained his host and convert Cornelius to serve it. When his converts demolished a pagan sanctuary nearby, the pagans took revenge during the Divine Liturgy: Autonomus was cut down — the Greek verses say stoned — at the very altar, and the deaconess Maria buried his body, later found incorrupt. He is commemorated on September 12.

• Our Holy Father Athanasius the Elder of Vysotsk (early 15th c.), and his disciple Athanasius the Younger (1395)

• Cornutus of Iconium

  Cornutus, bishop of Iconium — the Slavic calendars call him Coronatus, bishop of Nicomedia, and the see is transmitted both ways — was martyred under the persecutions of Decius and Valerian, in the years around 249–259. When the governor Perennius scoured the region and the Christians hid themselves, the aged bishop presented himself of his own accord; his legs were bound tightly with thin cords that cut to the bone, and he was led through the city in torment before being beheaded. He is commemorated on September 12.

• Eanswythe of Folkestone

  Eanswythe was a princess of Kent, granddaughter of Æthelberht, the first Christian king of the English, and daughter of King Eadbald; and she is remembered as the founder, about the year 630, of the community at Folkestone on the Kentish coast — by long tradition the first monastic house for women in England, and Eanswythe as the first English abbess. She refused a marriage offered her by a pagan Northumbrian prince, took the veil with her father's support, and died young. Almost nothing is transmitted of her life beyond that outline: she is a saint known from a cultus rather than from a biography. But in 1885 a leaden reliquary containing the bones of a young woman was found walled up in the parish church that bears her name, and in 2020 those bones were radiocarbon-dated to the middle of the seventh century and identified as those of a woman who died between about seventeen and twenty-two years of age — which makes Eanswythe one of the very few Anglo-Saxon saints whose relics can be shown to be plausibly her own.

• Julian of Galatia and his Forty Companions

  Julian was a priest of Galatia in the fourth century who, in time of persecution, hid in a cave near Ancyra with forty companions and continued to celebrate the divine services there. Arrested, he refused either to betray his companions or to sacrifice to the idols; stretched on a red-hot iron grate, he signed himself with the Cross and was preserved unharmed by an angel, and he was finally beheaded, praying that blessing would rest on all who took earth from his grave. The forty, hearing the heavenly voice that received him, came out of hiding, confessed Christ, and were beheaded in their turn. They are commemorated together on September 12.

• Simeon of Verkhoturye

  Simeon of Verkhoturye (c. 1607–1642) is the most beloved saint of the Russian Urals and Siberia — a nobleman who hid his birth to live as a poor wanderer among the newly settled and half-Christianised peoples of the frontier. Making his home by the village church of Merkushino near Verkhoturye, he supported himself by sewing coats for the poor, deliberately leaving each garment a little unfinished so as to earn reproach rather than praise, and he taught the faith to the local Russians and native peoples while fishing and praying in the wilderness. He died young and obscure, but in 1692 his coffin rose from the earth and his incorrupt relics began to work abundant healings; their translation to Verkhoturye in 1704 is his second feast.

• Theodore of Alexandria

  Theodore of Alexandria is remembered in the Byzantine synaxaria as a bishop of that city and a martyr: a bold preacher whom the pagans seized in the midst of his preaching, mocked and abused, and cast into the sea — the Russian tradition says from a cliff — from which he was brought out unharmed, before being beheaded and buried in Alexandria. Nothing else, not even his date, is transmitted. The OCA, against the Greek and Slavic service books, treats him as a lay Christian, distinct from Theodore the Archbishop of Alexandria kept on December 3, with whose thin record his own is easily entangled. He is commemorated on September 12.

• Ailbe of Emly

  Ailbe (Ailbhe, Latin Albeus) is the patron of Munster and by tradition the first bishop of Emly (Imlech Ibair) in Tipperary, remembered in Ireland as the greatest of the "pre-Patrician" saints — the four bishops (Ailbe, Declan, Ibar and Ciarán) said to have preached in the south of Ireland before Patrick came. The medieval Life of Declan has Patrick himself style him "Ailbe, the Patrick of Munster." His Latin Life tells of an infant exposed at a rock and suckled by a she-wolf, a journey to Rome, and the see of Emly received under King Óengus of Cashel; the Annals of Ulster record his repose under the years 527, 534 and 542. An Old Irish monastic Rule of Ailbe bears his name, and Welsh tradition — where he is Eilfyw, in English famously St Elvis — makes him the baptizer of David of Wales. All the Irish martyrologies keep his feast on September 12.

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