Ven. Xenia of Rome; Bl. Xenia of St Petersburg

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Xenia of Rome

  Xenia of Rome (†c. 450), called in the world Eusebia, was the only daughter of an eminent Roman senator who, to escape a marriage her parents had arranged, fled her father's house with two devoted maidservants. Reaching first the island of Kos and then Mylasa in Caria (in south-western Asia Minor), she took the name Xenia — "the stranger" — to hide her identity and to name the life she had chosen, and there, under the guidance of the local presbyter and later bishop Paul, she built a church of the Protomartyr Stephen and gathered a community of women, being ordained deaconess. She lived in fasting, humility, and boundless charity — benefactress to the poor, comforter of the grieving, guide of sinners to repentance — until her repose about the year 450, at which, the tradition says, a luminous sign of a cross wreathed in stars was seen above the convent. Her two maidservants, who had shared her flight and her ascesis, were buried at her feet. She is the ancient namesake of the Russian Xenia of Petersburg, with whom she shares January 24.

• Saint of the day

  Bl. Xenia of St Petersburg

  Xenia of Petersburg (c. 1719/1730 – c. 1803) is among the most beloved of all Russian saints — the widow of the court chorister Andrei Feodorovich who, when he died suddenly and unshriven while she was still young, gave away the whole of her property, put on his clothes, took his very name, and declared that "Xenia has died." For some forty-five years she wandered the Petersburg Side as a homeless fool-for-Christ, enduring cold, hunger, and mockery, praying by night in the open fields, and secretly carrying bricks up to the builders of the Smolensk cemetery church. She received the gifts of clairvoyance and healing, and her word — a blessing or a warning — was sought and feared across the capital. She reposed about the year 1803 and was buried at the Smolensk cemetery, where a chapel over her grave remains one of Russia's greatest places of pilgrimage. The Church Abroad glorified her in 1978, the Moscow Patriarchate in 1988. She is the patroness of Saint Petersburg and is invoked, above all, for marriage, employment, and a roof over one's head.

• Saint of the day

  Our Holy Mother Xenia of Petersburg, fool for Christ (ca. 1800)

• Our Holy Father Macedonian (ca. 430)

• Anastasius the Persian

  Anastasius the Persian (†628), born Magundat, was a Persian soldier and the son of a magus, who was converted to Christ by the miracles surrounding the True Cross that his own emperor Chosroes II had carried off from Jerusalem. Leaving the Persian army, he was baptized at Jerusalem by the Patriarch Modestus — taking the name Anastasius, "Resurrection" — and became a monk in the monastery of Abba Anastasius near the Holy City, where he passed seven years in ascetic labour. Burning to confess Christ before his own people, he went into Persian-occupied Caesarea of Palestine, openly denounced the fire-worship of the magi, and was seized, imprisoned, and cruelly tortured. Sent into Persia and pressed to renounce his faith, he was at last strangled with seventy other captive Christians and beheaded on January 22, 628. His relics, untouched by the dogs to which his body was thrown, were carried to his monastery in Palestine, thence to Constantinople and to Rome. He is honoured as a venerable-martyr — a monk crowned as a martyr — and his memory is bound to the Cross whose power first drew him to Christ.

• Babylas of Sicily, Timothy and Agapius

  Babylas of Sicily, with his two disciples Timothy and Agapius, were third-century martyrs. According to the synaxarion, Babylas — born to a wealthy family and raised a Christian — forsook the world for the ascetic life and drew to himself the two young disciples, with whom he crossed to the island of Sicily and preached Christ, converting many of the pagans there. The governor of the island, enraged at their success, had the three arrested and cruelly tortured; enduring all with patience, they were at last beheaded, and though their bodies were cast into a fire, the flames, the tradition says, did not consume them. They are commemorated together on January 24. This Babylas is a distinct saint from the great hieromartyr Babylas, bishop of Antioch, martyred a generation earlier.

• Macedonius the Hermit of Syria

  Macedonius (†c. 420), surnamed Kritophagos, "the barley-eater," was one of the great ascetics of the Syrian wilderness at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, known to us at first hand from Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who owed his own birth to the hermit's prayers and set his life among the Religious History. For some forty-five years Macedonius wandered the mountains of Syria, Phoenicia, and Cilicia with no roof and no settled place, living on nothing but barley moistened with water — whence his name — and later sheltering in a pit dug in the ground and, in old age, a small hut. Sought out from far off for his holiness, he healed the sick, cast out demons, and cured the barrenness of Theodoret's mother; famed for his gentleness and his refusal of all comfort, he reposed in peace, past the age of seventy, about the year 420.

• Neophytos the Recluse

  Neophytos the Recluse (1134–1219) — ho Enkleistos, "the Enclosed" — is among the greatest saints of Cyprus, called for his eloquence the "Chrysostom of the island." Born of a poor family at Lefkara and unlettered in youth, he entered the monastery of Saint John Chrysostom at Koutsovendis, learned his letters almost by grace alone, and after seeking the eremitic life in the Holy Land was led back to Cyprus, where in 1159 he found a cave in the hills above Paphos and made of it his Enkleistra ("Enclosure"), a hermitage dedicated to the Holy Cross. There, walled into his cell, he lived some sixty years as a recluse and yet became the teacher of a monastic community and of all Cyprus, leaving a vast body of homilies, biblical commentaries, hymns, and letters — among them a famous eyewitness lament over the calamities that fell on Cyprus with the Third Crusade and the conquest of the island by Richard the Lionheart (1191). He reposed on April 12, 1219; his relics were uncovered in 1750, and his Enkleistra remains a living monastery. His chief feast was transferred to January 24.

• Philo of Karpasia

  Philo (5th century) was bishop of Karpasia, on the Karpas peninsula at the north-eastern tip of Cyprus — a learned pastor ordained, the tradition holds, by Epiphanius of Salamis, and remembered above all as a biblical commentator. He wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs, which survives, and is credited also with expositions of the Pentateuch and other Scriptures, together with a letter to a monk Eucarpios. He governed his see in peace and reposed in peace in the fifth century. He is commemorated on January 24.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Guasacht, bishop of Granard (5th C)
• St. Cadoc of Wales (588)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings