7th Sunday of Pascha

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Dorotheus, Bishop of Tyre

  Dorotheus, Bishop of Tyre in Phoenicia, is remembered as one of the oldest martyrs of the Church: a hierarch of great learning who survived the whole of the Great Persecution under Diocletian, governed his see in the peace granted by Constantine, and then, when the apostate emperor Julian revived the sacrifices about the year 362, was seized and tortured to death at the age of some one hundred and seven years. Antiquity remembered him also as a writer, and a late Greek catalogue of the Seventy Apostles — one of the sources behind the Byzantine lists of the Seventy — travels under his name. He is commemorated on June 5.

• Our Holy Father Theodore the Hermit and Wonderworker (583)

  Theodore, called the Wonderworker, was a hermit of the wilderness of the Jordan in the sixth century, one of the great generation of Palestinian ascetics that produced Sabbas, Gerasimus and John the Silent. The one deed the tradition attaches firmly to his name is a miracle of mercy at sea: sailing on a ship whose drinking water had run out and whose passengers were dying of thirst, he blessed the salt water of the sea with the sign of the Cross and bade them draw and drink, and it was found sweet. He is commemorated on June 5.

• Blessed Igor-George, tonsured Gabriel, great prince of Chernigov and Kiev (1147)

  Igor Olgovich (†1147), of the princely house of Chernigov, held the throne of Kiev for a fortnight in 1146, was defeated and imprisoned, and in prison asked for and received the monastic tonsure with the name Gabriel, and then the great schema. Two years later, while he was standing at the Liturgy in the monastery church of St Theodore in Kiev, the Kiev mob — inflamed by rumours of a conspiracy of his kinsmen, and against the pleading of the metropolitan, the clergy and the prince's own brother — dragged him from the church, beat him, and killed him, leaving his body naked in the marketplace. He is venerated as a passion-bearer: a prince who had already given up the world and who did not resist. His murder is kept on September 19 and the translation of his relics to Chernigov in 1150 on June 5.

• Blessed Constantine, Metropolitan of Kiev (1159)

  Constantine, a Greek sent from Constantinople, was Metropolitan of Kiev from 1156 to 1158 in the bitterest crisis the young Church of Rus had yet known: the see had been filled without Constantinople's consent by Clement Smolyatich, and Constantine's task was to undo that irregular tenure — which he did with a severity that scandalised many, annulling Clement's ordinations and pronouncing anathema on the dead Grand Prince who had procured them. Driven from Kiev in 1158 by the son of the prince he had anathematised, he died at Chernigov in 1159, having first written a testament requiring that his body be flung out unburied as a penance for the disorder of which he held himself the cause. What followed — the storm over Kiev and the calm over Chernigov, the pillars of fire above the corpse, and the honourable burial on the third day — turned a broken man into a venerated one. He is commemorated on June 5.

• Anubius the Confessor

  Anubius — Anoub, in the Egyptian form of his name — was a confessor of the fourth-century persecutions who, having endured tortures for Christ and survived, went out into the Egyptian desert and spent the rest of his long life as an anchorite, gathering a small skete of six brethren, one of them his own brother. He is remembered in the desert literature for a single astonishing claim, made without boasting when he was asked for a word: that from the day he confessed the name of Christ before the persecutors, no lie had ever come out of his mouth, and no earthly thing had ever again drawn his desire. He is commemorated on June 5.

• Bassian and Jonah of Pertominsk

  Bassian and Jonah were monks of the Solovki Transfiguration monastery on the White Sea and disciples of the Igumen Philip — the future Metropolitan Philip of Moscow — who were drowned in a storm in the Una Bay (Unskaya Guba) in 1561. Their bodies were cast ashore at the place afterwards called Pertominsk, and were buried there by fishermen; signs and healings followed, a chapel was raised over the graves in 1599, and out of it grew the Pertominsk monastery. In 1694 Peter the Great, delivered from shipwreck in the same waters, came to their tomb and cut with his own hands a wooden cross in thanksgiving. The finding of their relics is commemorated on June 5.

• Boniface of Mainz

  Boniface (c. 675 – 754), born Wynfrith in the West Saxon country at Crediton in Devon, is the Apostle of the Germans: the English monk who spent nearly forty years preaching to the pagan tribes east of the Rhine, felled the sacred Oak of Donar at Geismar and built a church of its timber, organised the sees of Bavaria, Hesse and Thuringia, founded Fulda, held the reforming councils of the Frankish Church, and was made Archbishop of Mainz. In his eightieth year he laid down his see, returned to the Frisian mission where he had begun, and on June 5, 754, at Dokkum, was killed with fifty-two companions by an armed band — holding up, it was said, a gospel-book against the sword; the book, slashed through, is still kept at Fulda. He is commemorated on June 5.

• Dorotheus of Gaza

  Abba Dorotheus (c. 505 – c. 565) is one of the two or three most widely read spiritual writers of the Palestinian desert. Educated in classical letters and in medicine, he abandoned the world for the great coenobium of Abba Seridos at Thavatha near Gaza, where he was formed by the recluses Barsanuphius and John, served as guest-master and infirmarian, and trained the young Dositheus in the obedience that made him a saint in five years. Later he governed a monastery of his own between Gaza and Maiouma, and there gave the addresses that survive as the Spiritual Instructions (the Discourses) — a book of extraordinary sanity and warmth on humility, the cutting off of self-will, the refusal to judge, and the healing of the passions, which has never gone out of use among Orthodox monastics and is read as widely by lay people. He is commemorated on June 5.

• Illidius of Clermont

  Illidius (†c. 385) — Allyre in French — was the fourth bishop of Clermont in Auvergne, one of the earliest hierarchs of central Gaul of whom anything is known. His one recorded deed is a wonder: summoned to Trier to the daughter of the emperor, who was tormented by an unclean spirit, he healed her by prayer and fasting, and asked in return not gifts for himself but relief for his church. He died at Trier, and his body was brought home to Clermont, where his tomb became one of the great healing shrines of Gaul — Gregory of Tours, who wrote his memory down, was himself cured there as a boy. He is commemorated on June 5.

• Mark of Chios

  Mark, a new martyr of the Ottoman period, was a young man of Smyrna who in a weak hour denied Christ and professed Islam, repented bitterly, was received back and prepared for martyrdom in the monastic life, and then went deliberately to Chios to unsay his denial in public. Brought before the Turkish authority, he declared himself a Christian, refused every inducement to return to Islam, and was beheaded on June 5, 1801. He is commemorated on June 5 among the new martyrs of the Greek Church.

• Marcian, Nicander and Companions

  Ten Christians of Egypt — Marcian, Nicander, Hyperechius, Apollonius, Leonidas, Arius, Gorgias, Selenias, Irenaeus and Pambo — who suffered together in the last of the great persecutions, under Maximian (in the years between 305 and 311). The synaxarion preserves little more than their names and the manner of their death: arrested as Christians, they refused the sacrifices, were beaten and dragged along the ground until their flesh was torn from them, and were then dispatched by the sword. They are commemorated as one company on June 5, at the sixth ode of the canon of the day.

• Peter of Korisha

  Peter of Korisha (c. 1211 – c. 1270) is the great hermit of medieval Serbia: a peasant's son from the Hvosno country between Peć and the plain of Kosovo, who after his parents' death gave away what he had, settled his sister in a convent, and went out to live in the caves of the wilderness — first by the Black River (Crna Reka) and then in the rock above the village of Koriša, near Prizren, where he spent the rest of his life in the extremes of fasting, vigil and combat with the demons. A monastery grew at his cave, his Life was written within two generations by Theodosius of Hilandar, and he is remembered as the pattern of the eremitic, as opposed to the royal and monastic-founder, sanctity of the Serbian Church. He is commemorated on June 5.

• Theodore Yaroslavich

  Theodore (1218 – June 5, 1233) was the eldest son of Grand Prince Yaroslav Vsevolodovich and the elder brother of Alexander Nevsky. Set over Novgorod as his father's representative while still a boy, he led troops in the field at thirteen, and died with startling suddenness at fifteen, on or just before the day appointed for his wedding, while the guests and the feast were already assembled. He was buried in the Yuriev monastery outside Novgorod; his relics were found incorrupt when Swedish soldiers broke open the tomb in 1614, and were afterwards translated to the cathedral of Holy Wisdom in Novgorod, where they rest. He is commemorated on June 5.

British Isles and Ireland

• Hieromartyr Boniface (Wynfrith) of Crediton, Apostle of Germany (754)
• SS Waccar, Gundekar, Elleher, Hathawulf and Companions, monks martyred with St. Boniface
• Holy Martyr Eoban, companion of SS Willibrord and Boniface (754)
• St. Adalar (Adalher) (755)
• St. Tudno (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings