Ven. Theodore the Sanctified; Trans. Rel. Ephraim, Abbot of Perekop

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Theodore the Sanctified

  Theodore the Sanctified (c. 314 – 368) was the beloved disciple of Pachomius the Great and, after him, the man who held the Pachomian koinonia together. Born to wealth at Latopolis in the Upper Thebaid, he came to Tabennisi as a youth of about eighteen and became Pachomius's closest companion and "the comforter of the brothers." A single lapse — consenting, while his father was still alive, to be spoken of as his successor — cost him years of penance and taught him the humility that his later office demanded. When the confederation of monasteries fell into revolt under Horsiesios, Theodore was called out of retirement to govern it; he ruled from Pbow for some eighteen years, restored its unity and discipline, never claimed the title of father for himself, and stood at the side of Athanasius the Great in the Arian struggle. At his repose Horsiesios resumed the leadership he had laid down.

• Saint of the day

  Trans. Rel. Ephraim, Abbot of Perekop

  Ephraim of Perekom (1412–1492) was a monastic founder of the Novgorod land, the builder of the Perekom monastery of St Nicholas on the marshy western shore of Lake Ilmen. Born at Kashin in Tver and baptised Eustathius, he left his father's house as a young man, was tested at Kalyazin, and took the habit at the monastery of Sabbas of Vishera, where he received the name Ephraim. About 1450 he went out to the mouth of the river Verenda and settled in the wet forest by the Black River; brethren gathered, the archbishop of Novgorod ordained him priest, and the community dug a channel through the low ground to carry the water away — the perekop that gave the house, and its founder, their name. He reposed on 26 September 1492 and was numbered among the saints at the Moscow council of 1549; May 16 keeps the translation of his relics, made when the flooding of the lake at last forced the monastery to move.

• Saint of the day

  Our Holy Father Theodore the Sanctified (368), disciple of St Pachomius the Great

• St Nicholas Mystikos, Patriarch of Constantinople (930)

  Nicholas the Mystikos (852 – 15 May 925) was twice Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and is honoured as a saint for the one act that cost him his throne: his refusal to bless the fourth marriage of the emperor Leo VI the Wise. A kinsman and pupil of Photios the Great, he had served as mystikos — the emperor's confidential secretary, whence his surname — before his elevation in 901. When Leo, having buried three wives, took a fourth, Nicholas baptised the child of that union, the future Constantine VII, but shut the emperor out of the church; for this he was deposed and exiled in 907. Restored on Leo's death in 912, he was for a time head of the regency for the boy emperor, negotiated with Simeon of Bulgaria at the walls of the City, and lived to preside over the Tomos of Union of 920, which closed the schism his own resistance had begun by forbidding fourth marriages outright in the Church's law.

• Blessed Musa the Maiden (5th c.)

  Musa was a Roman girl of the fifth century whose whole story is one page of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, told to him by her own brother, the monk Probus. The Mother of God appeared to the child in a vision, among a company of girls of her own age dressed in white, and asked whether she wished to be one of them and to live in her train. Musa said that she did, and was given a rule for it: to leave off the frivolity and the light words of her age, and to wait — for in thirty days she would come. The girl changed, so completely that her household could not account for it. On the twenty-fifth day she took a fever; on the thirtieth the Theotokos came again with the same company, and Musa, answering "I come, Lady, I come," gave up her spirit. She is one of the very few children in the calendar who are neither martyrs nor monastics, and is commemorated on May 16.

• St Brendan the Voyager, abbot of Clonfert (ca. 577)

• Alexander of Jerusalem

  Alexander of Jerusalem (died c. 251) was a bishop of the early third century, remembered as a disciple of Clement of Alexandria and fellow-student of Origen, as the founder of the first great Christian theological library, and as a confessor who twice suffered imprisonment for the faith. First bishop in Cappadocia and then, uniquely for his age, coadjutor and successor to the aged Narcissus of Jerusalem, he governed that Church for nearly four decades before dying in prison at Caesarea during the persecution of Decius.

• Cassian of Komel

  Cassian of Komel (†1537) was a disciple of Cornelius of Komel and, for a time, abbot of his master's monastery of the Presentation in the Komel forest near Vologda. When Cornelius, old and weary of the honours pressed on him, withdrew to Lake Sura, the brethren chose Cassian to govern in his place, and he did so with the elder's approval and in the elder's spirit, holding the community to prayer, inward attention and the renunciation of worldly cares. When Cornelius returned, Cassian laid down the office without a murmur and took his place again among the obedient. He is commemorated on May 16 with his fellow-disciple Laurence of Komel.

• Forty-four Martyrs of the Lavra of Saint Sabbas

  In the catastrophe that overtook Palestine about the year 614 — the Persian invasion under Chosroes II, the sack of Jerusalem, and the raiding of the countryside by the Arab tribes who came in its train — a band of raiders broke into the Great Lavra of Saint Sabbas in the ravine of the Kedron, seeking the treasure a famous monastery was assumed to possess. Finding nothing, they turned on the monks. Forty-four fathers were killed, some beheaded, others more cruelly, and the community was scattered. Their memory was preserved by one of their own survivors, Antiochus the Monk of the same Lavra, who wrote an account of them, and the Church keeps them on May 16 as venerable-martyrs — monks who did not seek martyrdom but received it in their own cells.

• George of Mitylene

  George the Confessor was bishop of Mitylene on Lesbos in the last phase of the iconoclast struggle, holding the see in the years around 820–829 — that is, through the renewal of the persecution of the holy icons under Leo V the Armenian and Michael II — and suffering for the icons before dying in peace at Mitylene about 842, in the very year the images were restored. He is the second of three bishops of Mitylene named George whom the calendar honours, and the least well documented of them; his relics were still shown at Mitylene in the twelfth century, when the Russian abbot Daniel saw them on his pilgrimage to the East and wrote them down among the wonders of his journey.

• Laurence of Komel

  Laurence of Komel (†16 May 1548) was a disciple of Cornelius of Komel and, from 1538, abbot of his monastery of the Presentation in the Komel forest near Vologda — chosen unanimously by the brethren on the elder's own recommendation. He governed ten years, enlarged the monastery's charge by taking the small house of Koptevo under it in 1547, brought the community safely out of the way of a Tatar raid and back again when the danger had passed, and through all the business of an abbacy never gave up his own beloved labour of copying books. He reposed on the day of his commemoration, and is kept on May 16 with Cassian of Komel.

• Nicholas of Metsovo

  Nicholas — surnamed Basdanis — was a poor young man of Metsovo in Epirus who, working for a Muslim baker in Trikkala in Thessaly, was worn down by the daily pressure of his employers and denied Christ, accepting Islam. Conscience gave him no rest. He went home to Metsovo, was reconciled to the Church, and lived quietly, carting wood down to Trikkala to sell; but he judged that repentance was not enough where the denial had been public, and after taking counsel with his spiritual father at Meteora — who warned him against rashness and then armed him for what he intended — he went back to Trikkala, provoked the exposure he had been avoiding, and confessed before the kadi that he had been a Muslim and had returned to Christ. A fire was built in the market place and he was burnt alive in it on 16 May 1617. His skull, bought from his executioners by a Christian and hidden in a wall, was recovered the next year and given to the monastery of Varlaam at Meteora, where it is venerated.

• Vitus, Modestus and Crescentia

  Vitus was a boy of a great pagan house of Sicily or Lucania who was brought to Christ in secret by the two servants who had charge of him — his tutor Modestus and his nurse Crescentia — and who suffered with them about the year 303, in the persecution of Diocletian. The passion relates that his own father tried first indulgence and then torture to break him; that the three fled by sea to Lucania in southern Italy; that Vitus, brought before the emperor, cast a demon out of the emperor's son and was for that repaid with the cauldron and the lions, from which he came out unhurt; and that the three at last gave up their souls together by the river Silarus. In the West Vitus became one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages — patron of Bohemia and of Saxony, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, invoked against the nervous disorder still called St Vitus's dance. In Slavic and Byzantine usage the three are kept on May 16, and in the West on June 15.

• Vukasin of Klepci

  Vukašin was a Serbian peasant of Klepci, a village in Herzegovina above the Neretva, whose household was destroyed in the massacres of 1941 and who was taken to the Jasenovac camp, where he was killed in 1943. He is honoured for the manner of his dying. The account, which came into the Church's hands through the physician who afterwards treated his executioner, relates that the guard, having decided to make sport of him, offered to spare him if he would cry out the salute of the Ustaša state; and that the old man, as he was mutilated piece by piece, answered each demand with the same words — "Do your work, my child" — until his tormentor broke down. The Serbian Church numbered him among the saints in 1998 with the New Martyrs of Jasenovac, and he is commemorated on May 16.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Carantoc the Wonderworker (430)
• St. Carantoc, abbot of Llangranog (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings