Sunday of the Prodigal Son

Saints commemorated

• St Leo, Bishop of Catania

  Leo the Wonderworker (c. 703 – c. 780) was bishop of Catania in Sicily, an island then still within the Byzantine Empire. Born at Ravenna of noble and pious parents and renowned from youth for his charity to the poor and to strangers, he was ordained at Ravenna, served as archdeacon at Reggio in Calabria, and was called to the see of Catania, which he governed with such gentleness and generosity that the whole island honoured him. The tradition remembers him above all as a wonderworker who healed the sick, and for his victory over the sorcerer Heliodorus — a baptized Catanian turned magician, whose public bewitchments had long defied and mocked the Church. When at last Heliodorus disrupted the very Liturgy, Leo bound him with his omophorion, led him into a great fire, and stood praying within the flames unharmed while the sorcerer was reduced to ashes, so that all glorified God. He reposed in peace on February 20 and was buried in a church he had built at Catania, where his relics gave healing. He is not to be confused with Leo the Great of Rome (February 18).

• St Bessarion the Great, wonder-worker of Egypt (466)

  Bessarion the Great (died c. 466) was one of the great desert fathers of fifth-century Egypt, a wonderworker of Scetis and disciple, the tradition holds, of Anthony the Great and of Macarius the Great. He is known above all from the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, where a chapter of his sayings and a memoir by his disciple Doulas preserve both his teaching and his miracles: how on a waterless shore he prayed and the salt sea grew sweet to drink; how, to reach an elder before nightfall, he prayed and the sun stood still in its course; how he crossed a river dry-shod. He owned nothing and stayed nowhere, passing his life homeless "like a bird," sleeping in the open among the rocks and thorns, so poised in unceasing prayer and self-denial that his brethren likened him to the bodiless powers. He reposed in extreme old age. The day of his memory is not agreed: the Greek Menaion keeps him on February 20, the Slavonic books and the OCA on June 6, where he heads the day together with Hilarion the New of Dalmatia.

• Thirty-four Holy Martyrs of the Monastery of Valaam (1578)

• Agathon of Rome

  Agathon (c. 577 – 681) was Pope of Rome from 678 to 681, under whom the Sixth Ecumenical Council — Constantinople III (680–681) — condemned the heresy of Monotheletism, the teaching of a single will in Christ. A Sicilian of Greek origin, born about Palermo, he gave away his inheritance to the poor, became a monk, and served long as treasurer of the Roman church before his election. When the Emperor Constantine IV summoned a council to end the long controversy over the wills of Christ, Agathon gathered the Western bishops in synod and sent to Constantinople a celebrated dogmatic letter confessing the two natural wills and two energies of the incarnate Word, which the Council received with acclamation as the voice of Peter, and upon which it framed its definition. Renowned besides for the multitude of his miracles — whence the Greeks style him Thaumaturgus, the Wonderworker — he reposed in 681. The East keeps his memory on February 20; the West on January 10, the day of his repose.

• Cornelius of the Pskov Caves

  Cornelius (1501–1570) was the great abbot of the Pskov Caves (Pskovo-Pechersky) Monastery, under whom that border-house rose to be one of the foremost monasteries of Russia. Born of a noble Pskov family and schooled at the Mirozh monastery, he became a monk at the Caves and was made abbot at twenty-eight; for forty years he built and adorned the monastery, ringed it with a stone fortress-wall, expanded the God-hewn caves and their church, gathered a great library, wrote and continued the Pskov chronicle, and carried the Gospel to the Estonian and Setu peoples of the borderland, founding churches among them. In 1570, during Ivan the Terrible's terror against Pskov and Novgorod, the Tsar, persuaded that Cornelius was a traitor, struck off his head at the monastery gate as the abbot came out to bless him — then, seized with remorse, took up the body in his own arms and bore it into the church, so that the way is called the Bloody Path to this day. Venerated at once as a martyr, Cornelius is commemorated on February 20.

• Sadoth of Persia

  Sadoth (Syriac Shahdost, "friend of the king"; Slavic Sadoc) was the second bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the royal city of Persia, succeeding Symeon Barsabae when that first great martyr of the Persian church was slain at the outbreak of Shapur II's persecution. Warned in a vision of a ladder — Symeon calling from its summit, "I climbed yesterday; do thou climb today" — he was arrested in the persecution's second year with his clergy, monks and consecrated virgins, held five months in chains, tortured, and commanded to worship the sun; refusing, he was taken to Beth Lapat and beheaded, about the year 342, and his company — 128 in the Slavic count, 120 in the Greek — died by the sword. He is commemorated on October 19 and again on February 20.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Bolcan, bishop of Derkan (480)
• St. Colgan, abbot of Clonmacnoise (c.796)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings