17th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Ss Peter, Aleksy, Jonah, Philip, Germogen, Metrs. Moscow

  Jonah (†1461) was the last Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia to be styled by the old title and the first to be consecrated in Moscow by Russian bishops alone — the hinge on which the Russian Church turned from dependence on Constantinople to self-government. Tonsured at twelve in a monastery of his native Galich, and afterwards a monk of the Simonov monastery at Moscow, where the Metropolitan Photius found him asleep in the bakery with his right hand set in the gesture of blessing and prophesied that he would be a great hierarch, he was made Bishop of Ryazan and Murom, was twice passed over for the metropolitanate, and finally received it in 1448 after the Russian Church had deposed Isidore for accepting the union of Florence. He governed thirteen years, was credited with the deliverance of Moscow from the Tatar raid of 1451, and reposed in 1461; his relics were found incorrupt in 1472 and lie in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin. He was glorified by the Council of 1547.

• Holy Martyr Charitina of Amissos (304)

• Our Holy Mother Methodia of Kimolos (1865)

  Methodia of Kimolos (1865–1908) is the ascetic saint of the small Cycladic island of Kimolos. Born Irene, a daughter of Jacob Sardis and his wife Maria, she was married to a sailor to please her parents and widowed when his ship was lost off Asia Minor; she then received the monastic tonsure from Archbishop Methodios of Syros in the church of Panagia Hodegetria on her island, taking the name Methodia. Her ascetic struggle was severe, and the women of the islands sought out her cell as a refuge, finding in her counsel healing for the soul; God granted her also the grace of working miracles. She reposed in peace on Sunday, October 5, 1908, and was glorified as a saint in 1991; her feast is kept on the day of her repose.

• Charitina of Amisus

  Charitina of Amisus (†304) was a young virgin-martyr of Pontus on the Black Sea coast: an orphan brought up as his own daughter by the Christian Claudius, in whose household she served. Denounced during the persecution of Diocletian as a Christian who won others to the faith, she confessed Christ before the count Dometius and endured a long catalogue of tortures — her head shorn and burned, her flesh pierced with heated spits, her nails and teeth torn out, herself cast into the sea with a stone about her neck — and, threatened at the last with dishonour, gave up her soul in prayer. The Greek and Slavic calendars alike keep her memory on October 5, of which day she is the principal saint.

• Peter of Moscow

  Peter, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia (c. 1260–1326), was the first primate of the Russian Church to make his residence at Moscow, and by that act one of the founders of Moscow's greatness. Born in Volhynia, a monk, icon-painter and abbot of his own foundation on the river Rata, he was consecrated Metropolitan of Russia at Constantinople about 1308, in an age when the see, uprooted from devastated Kiev, had settled at Vladimir. Amid the disorders of the Tatar yoke Peter befriended the rising princes of Moscow, transferred the metropolitan residence there in 1325, and blessed the laying of the foundations of the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin, foretelling that Moscow would be exalted above all the cities of Russia. He reposed on December 21, 1326, was buried in the cathedral he had begun, and was glorified in 1339 as the first wonderworking hierarch of Moscow. He is commemorated on December 21, and among the Hierarchs of Moscow on October 5.

• Philip of Moscow

  Philip (1507–1569), born Theodore Kolychev of a great Moscow boyar family, was the hierarch-martyr who rebuked Ivan the Terrible to his face and paid for it with his life. Forsaking the court in his thirtieth year, he became a monk and then the renowned builder-abbot of the Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea before Ivan drew him, against his will, to be Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia (1566). From the cathedral pulpit he denounced the murders of the Oprichnina and refused to bless the Tsar in his blood-guilt; for this he was deposed in the midst of the Liturgy, stripped of his vestments, and exiled to a monastery in Tver, where in December 1569 the oprichnik Malyuta Skuratov strangled him in his cell. His relics were carried to Solovki in 1591 and, in 1652, translated in triumph to the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin, the Tsar sending a letter of repentance for his forebear's crime. He is venerated as a hieromartyr and wonderworker, the very type of the pastor who lays down his life against tyranny, and is kept on January 9.

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