Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee

Saints commemorated

• Antiochian commemoration

  Martyr Tryphon

  Tryphon of Campsada (c. 232 – c. 250) is among the most beloved of the popular saints of the Orthodox world — a Phrygian peasant boy, keeper of geese, who from childhood was given power over unclean spirits and over the vermin and blights that ruin the fields. While still young he cast a demon out of the daughter of the emperor Gordian, and under the persecution of Decius he was seized, tortured, and condemned at Nicaea, giving up his spirit before the executioner's sword could fall, about the year 250. His memory is bound above all to the land and its labour: he is invoked against locusts, caterpillars, mice, and every pest of the crops, over gardens and vineyards, and the euchologia preserve a "Prayer of Saint Tryphon" adjuring the creatures that harm the fields to depart. Patron of gardeners, farmers, and (in the Russian tradition) of falconers and hunters, he is kept on February 1, the day of the forefeast of the Meeting of the Lord.

• Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicity, and those with them at Carthage (203)

  Perpetua and Felicity, with their companions Saturus, Revocatus, Saturninus, and Secundulus, were martyred in the amphitheatre at Carthage about the year 203, in the persecution of the emperor Septimius Severus. Vibia Perpetua was a young noblewoman of about twenty-two, a nursing mother; Felicity was a slave, heavily pregnant; the others were young catechumens arrested with them and baptised in prison. Their memory is uniquely precious because part of their story is told in Perpetua's own hand: the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity preserves her prison diary, with the visions that sustained her, and an eyewitness account of their death. Secundulus died in prison; Felicity gave birth to a daughter days before the games; and the rest were exposed to the beasts and then dispatched by the sword. They are among the most celebrated martyrs of the ancient Church, kept in the East on February 1.

• Our Holy Mother Brigid of Kildare (524)

  Brigid of Kildare (c. 451 – c. 525) is, with Patrick and Columba, one of the three patron saints of Ireland, and the most beloved of Irish women saints — honoured as the "Mary of the Gael." Born about the year 451 to a Leinster chieftain and a Christian bondwoman, she was drawn from childhood to a life of prayer and boundless charity, took the veil as a consecrated virgin, and founded at Kildare (Cill Dara, "the church of the oak") a great double monastery of women and men that became one of the chief centres of the Irish Church, where a sacred fire was kept perpetually burning in her memory. The hagiography surrounds her with miracles of compassion — food and butter and drink multiplied for the poor, her very cloak spreading to enclose the land granted her. A saint of the undivided Church, she reposed at Kildare about 525 and is kept on February 1.

• Basil of Thessalonica

  Basil, Archbishop of Thessalonica, is commemorated among the holy hierarchs on February 1. The Greek synaxarion styles him a confessor — one who suffered for the faith yet reposed in peace — and honours him as an archbishop of the great Macedonian metropolis of Thessalonica; but the surviving notice is bare, and neither his dates nor the circumstances of his confession are securely transmitted. He is most plausibly placed in the age of the iconoclast persecutions, among the hierarchs who upheld the veneration of the holy icons, though this cannot be affirmed from the record. He is kept on February 1 with the martyr Tryphon and the forefeast of the Meeting of the Lord.

• Peter the Hermit of Galatia

  Peter the Hermit of Galatia (c. 330 – c. 429) was one of the ascetic fathers of the region of Antioch whose life is recorded by Theodoret of Cyrrhus in his Religious History. A Galatian by origin, he embraced the solitary life from his youth, made pilgrimage to the holy places of Palestine, and settled at last near Antioch, where he lived in stillness and great austerity in a rock-cell, wearing a single garment and taking the barest food. God granted him a gift of healing, and Theodoret — who as a boy knew him and whose own mother he cured — testifies to his miracles from personal knowledge. He reposed in extreme old age, about ninety-nine years, around the year 429, and is commemorated on February 1.

• Vendemianus of Bithynia

  Vendemianus (Bendimianos) of Bithynia was an ascetic of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, a disciple of the great ascetic Auxentius of the mountain near Chalcedon. Born in Mysia, he came in his youth to Saint Auxentius, and after his master's repose withdrew to the same Mount Oxia above Chalcedon in Bithynia, where he shut himself into a narrow rock-cell and lived out forty-two years of prayer, fasting, and stillness, adorned with the gift of wonders. He reposed in peace about the year 512, and is commemorated on February 1.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Euny of Western Cornwall (6th C)
• St. Crewenna, missionary in Cornwall (5th C)
• St. Jarlath, bishop of Armagh (c.480)
• St. Cinnia, Princess of Ulster (5th C)
• St. Darlugdach, second abbess of Kildare (c.524)
• St.Ursus, Irish missionary in Gaul & Italy (6th C)
• St. Ina of Llanina (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings