Martyrs Menas, Victor and Vincent

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Menas, Victor and Vincent

  Menas of Egypt (c. 285 – c. 309) was an Egyptian soldier of the Roman army who, at the height of the Diocletianic persecution, cast down his military belt, withdrew to the wilderness, and then returned to confess Christ openly before a pagan festival at Cotyaeum in Phrygia, for which he was tortured and beheaded. Buried in the desert west of Alexandria, his tomb became one of the greatest healing shrines of the Christian East: the vast pilgrimage city of Abu Mena grew around it, and the clay flasks stamped with his image — the saint standing in prayer between two camels — were carried by pilgrims across the whole Mediterranean world. One of the most beloved military martyrs and wonderworkers of the Church, he is commemorated on November 11.

• Our Righteous Father Theodore the Studite (826)

  Theodore the Studite (759–826) was the great abbot of the monastery of Stoudios at Constantinople, the foremost monastic reformer and confessor of the Byzantine Church, and the most uncompromising defender of the holy icons in the second iconoclast controversy. Through his Rule, his catechetical instructions, and his vast correspondence he refounded coenobitic monasticism on a footing of common life, manual labour, and daily obedience that shaped Eastern monasticism ever after; the Stoudite typikon governed the worship of Constantinople and passed to Mount Athos, Kiev, and the whole Slavonic world. Thrice exiled and scourged for his resistance to imperial interference in the Church, he died in confession on November 11, 826.

• Maximus of Moscow

  Maximus of Moscow (died 1434) was a fool-for-Christ of medieval Russia who bore the hardest form of ascetic self-emptying, walking about Moscow almost naked summer and winter, homeless and enduring heat and frost alike. Comforting the poor amid the calamities of the Tatar yoke, famine, and plague, and rebuking the rich and powerful for hardness of heart, he spoke his wisdom in the proverbs of the common people. Buried at the Moscow church of Saints Boris and Gleb, he was glorified as a wonderworker in 1547 and his relics uncovered the same year.

• Victor and Stephanida

  Victor and Stephanida were martyrs of the second century, put to death at Damascus in the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180). Victor, a Christian soldier, refused the sacrifice demanded of the legions and passed unharmed through a succession of tortures, working miracles that converted his persecutors; Stephanida, the young wife of one of his torturers, seeing the power of Christ at work in him, confessed the faith aloud and was martyred by being torn apart between two bent palm trees. They are commemorated together on November 11.

• Vincent of Saragossa

  Vincent of Saragossa (died 304) was a deacon of the Spanish church and the protomartyr of the Iberian peninsula, put to death at Valencia in the persecution of Diocletian. Ordained by Bishop Valerius of Saragossa and given charge of preaching in his stead, he was arrested with his bishop, defended the faith with famous eloquence before the governor Dacian, and endured a series of savage tortures — the rack, the iron hooks, the gridiron — before dying in prison. One of the most widely venerated martyrs of the ancient West, honoured already by Augustine and Prudentius, he is kept in the Byzantine calendar among the martyrs of November 11.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Cynfran of Carnarvonshire (5th C)
• St. Bertuin (c.698)
• St. Rhediw of Llanllyfni

Troparia & kontakia

Readings