Forefeast of the Procession of the Lifegiving Cross

Saints commemorated

• Righteous Joseph of Arimathea

  Joseph of Arimathea is the rich and noble counsellor — εὐσχήμων βουλευτής — who alone of the Sanhedrin refused to consent to the condemnation of Christ, and who, when the Twelve had scattered, went in to Pontius Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. All four Evangelists record him; the Church names him in every one of her Passion services. With Nicodemus he took the Lord down from the Cross, wound the body in clean linen with the spices, and laid it in his own new tomb, hewn in the rock in a garden beside Golgotha — the sepulchre from which Christ rose, and the holiest place in the Christian world. Tradition adds that he afterwards preached the Gospel and reposed in peace; the Church keeps his memory on July 31 and, with the myrrhbearing women and Nicodemus, on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

• Righteous Eudocimus of Cappadocia (9th c.)

  Eudocimus was a young Cappadocian nobleman and imperial official of the reign of the iconoclast emperor Theophilus (829–842), who was made governor of the theme of Charsianon and died there at about the age of thirty-three. He is the Church's clearest example of a saint whose whole sanctity was deliberately hidden: he took no monastic vow and worked no public wonder, but kept virginity, fasted, prayed by night, judged justly and gave secretly to widows, orphans and the poor, and asked to be buried in the clothes he died in and without ceremony. His hiddenness was undone from heaven. Healings began at his grave; eighteen months later his mother came from Constantinople, the tomb was opened, and the body was found whole and incorrupt, the face bright as though alive, and giving off fragrance. The relics were carried to Constantinople and laid in a silver reliquary in the church his parents built.

• Righteous Joseph of Arimathea (1st c.)

• Arsenius of Ninotsminda

  Arsenius was a Georgian bishop who resigned his see to become a monk, and one of the greatest scholars of the golden age of Georgian letters — a translator, writer, calligrapher and theologian. Tonsured at Jerusalem, he returned to Georgia and was consecrated bishop of Ninotsminda in Kakheti, but the office was a burden to a contemplative, and he obtained leave from David III Kuropalates to lay it down. With his friend John Grdzelidze he was invited to the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos, where the two of them joined Euthymius the Iberian in the enormous labour of translating the Scriptures and the Fathers into Georgian. He died there in great old age and was buried at the monastery's church of Saint Symeon the Stylite; George the Hagiorite afterwards moved his bones into the main ossuary.

• Benjamin of Petrograd and Those with Him

  Benjamin (Kazansky) was the first bishop in the history of the Russian Church to be elected by the free vote of his own diocese, chosen metropolitan of Petrograd in the summer of 1917 by clergy and laity together. In the famine of 1922 he offered the Soviet state the church plate freely, on condition that the parishes gave it and not the police took it; when the state repudiated the agreement and installed the Renovationist schismatics in his place, he excommunicated their leader, and was arrested within days. He was tried with eighty-six others in a show trial at Petrograd in June and July 1922, sentenced to death on 5 July, and shot in the night of 12–13 August 1922 together with the archimandrite Sergius (Shein) and two laymen, the law professor Yuri Novitsky and the advocate John Kovsharov — all four shaved and dressed in rags so that the firing squad should not know it was killing a bishop. His word at the trial has become the epitaph of the Russian new martyrs: Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee for all things.

• Dionysius of Vatopedi

  Dionysius was a monk of the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos who was sent out in 1822 with the monastery's greatest treasure, the Holy Belt of the Theotokos, to a plague-stricken Crete. It was the second year of the Greek insurrection, and the island was under Ottoman reprisal. He was seized by the Turkish authorities, offered his life if he would accept Islam, and refused; heated iron stakes were driven into his temples, and when he still would not deny Christ he was hanged — on Clean Monday of that year, the first day of Great Lent. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints, and the Russian Church entered his name in her calendar in 2007.

• Germanus of Auxerre

  Germanus was a Gallo-Roman advocate and provincial governor who was seized by his own city, tonsured against his will and made bishop of Auxerre in 418, and who thereafter lived with a severity that astonished Gaul — barley bread and ashes, one meal after dark, no wine, a hair shirt under the episcopal dress, and the same coarse hood worn for thirty years. He crossed to Britain in 429 with Lupus of Troyes to put down the Pelagian teaching, disputed with its masters at Verulamium and prayed at the tomb of the martyr Alban, and is remembered there for the "Alleluia victory," when a newly baptised British army routed a Saxon and Pictish raid by the shout of the Paschal word alone. He stopped an Alan army on the road into Armorica by taking its king's bridle in his hand, and died at Ravenna on 31 July 448 while petitioning the emperor for the pardon of the province he had saved. His life, written by Constantius of Lyon within a generation, is one of the great documents of the fifth-century West.

• Julitta of Caesarea

  Julitta was a Christian woman of Caesarea in Cappadocia whose property was seized by a powerful pagan neighbour in the last persecution, under Diocletian. When she sued him before the governor, her opponent's answer was to inform the court that she was a Christian — which put her outside the protection of the law altogether and turned her lawsuit into a capital trial. The judge offered to restore her estate if she would sacrifice; she refused, and was burned at Caesarea in 304 or 305. Seventy years afterwards Basil the Great, bishop of that city, preached her panegyric, and the sermon survives: it is one of the very few martyr-dossiers of the Great Persecution that rests on a named contemporary Father rather than on a passion of unknown date.

• Twelve Roman Martyrs

  Twelve martyrs of Rome, commemorated on July 31 in the Greek synaxarion by a single line — Οἱ ἅγιοι δώδεκα μάρτυρες οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι ξίφει τελειοῦνται, "the holy twelve martyrs, the Romans, are perfected by the sword." No names, no persecutor, no emperor, no year, no relics, no office: a number, a city and a manner of death. They are one of the many bare notices of the Byzantine calendar which the Church has kept precisely because they are bare — a company whose members she does not know by name and commemorates anyway.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Neot, hermit in Cornwall (c.877)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings