Holy Pascha

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  St Athanasius the Great, Patr. of Alexandria

  Athanasius the Great (c. 296 – 373) was Archbishop of Alexandria, the champion of the Nicene faith and, with Basil the Great, one of only two Eastern fathers whom the Church styles by universal consent "the Great." Present at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325) as a young deacon, he became through a long episcopate the tireless defender of the Council's confession that the Son is homoousios — "of one essence" — with the Father, against the Arianism that for two generations captured emperors, courts, and councils. Five times driven from his see and some seventeen years an exile, he held the faith when almost the whole world had gone over to Arius, so that his name became a proverb — Athanasius contra mundum, "Athanasius against the world." He wrote the classic statement of the Incarnation, On the Incarnation of the Word; the Life of Antony, which carried the monastic ideal through the whole Church, East and West; and, in his thirty-ninth Festal Letter of 367, the first listing of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament exactly as the Church now receives them. He died in peace at Alexandria on May 2, 373, having outlived his persecutors and secured the triumph of Orthodoxy. He is kept on January 18 together with Cyril of Alexandria, and on May 2, the day of his repose.

• Beginning of the Pentecostarion

• Saint Matrona (the Blind) of Moscow (1952)

• Holy Martyrs Hesperus, his wife Zoë, and their sons Cyriac and Theodulus (2nd c.)

  A whole household of slaves perfected together: Hesperus and his wife Zoe, with their two sons Cyriacus and Theodulus, servants of a rich pagan named Catullus at Attalia in Pamphylia, who suffered about the year 135, in the reign of Hadrian. They had been Christians from childhood and kept themselves from the meat and wine of the idol-sacrifices; when at a birthday feast in their master's house such food was sent down to the slaves, Zoe poured out the wine and threw away the flesh rather than be defiled. The sons were hung upon a tree and torn with iron claws while their parents stood by and encouraged them, and all four were then cast into a heated furnace, where they gave up their souls. Their bodies, the account says, were found untouched by the fire, and singing was heard over them. They are commemorated on May 2.

• Holy Tsar Boris-Michael of Bulgaria (907)

  Boris, prince (knyaz) of the Bulgarians from 852 to 889 and called Michael at his baptism about 864, is the Baptizer of Bulgaria: the ruler who brought a pagan Turkic-Slavic state into the Church, secured for it a church of its own under Constantinople, received the exiled disciples of Cyril and Methodius in 886, and by that act made Bulgaria the nursery of Slavonic letters and the Slavonic liturgy for the whole Orthodox Slavic world. He laid down his power in 889 to become a monk, came out of the monastery once — to depose and blind his own eldest son for attempting to restore paganism — and having set his son Symeon on the throne returned to his cell, where he died on 2 May 907. The Church honours him as equal-to-the-apostles, and his commemoration on May 2 is kept by the Bulgarian, Russian and other Slavic Churches.

• Translation of the Relics (1072 and 1115) of the Holy Passion-bearers Boris and Gleb, princes of Russia (1015)

  Boris and Gleb, sons of Vladimir the Baptizer of Rus' and named Roman and David at the font, were killed in the succession war of 1015 on the orders — so the tradition holds — of their elder brother Svyatopolk, and are honoured as the first canonised saints of the Christian Rus'. Neither died confessing Christ before pagans: both refused to lift a hand against an elder brother and accepted an unjust death in the meekness of the Lord, and for this the Slavic Church gave them a title of its own — passion-bearers (strastoterptsy). Their bodies were gathered at Vyshgorod beside the church of St Basil, where miracles began at once; the translations of their relics into new churches in 1072 and 1115 are kept on May 2, and their murder on July 24. Around them grew the earliest cycle of Russian hagiography — the Chronicle tale, the anonymous Tale and Passion and Encomium, and Nestor's Lesson — and with it the ideal of the innocent, non-resisting prince that shaped the sanctity of Rus' for six centuries.

• Athanasius Patelarios

  Athanasius III Patelarios, a Cretan of the noble Greek house of Patelarios, was three times Patriarch of Constantinople in the harried decades of the mid-seventeenth century, never for long: forty days at his first accession in 1634, fifteen at his last in 1652. Learned in many tongues, a preacher and a translator, he spent most of his life travelling — Athos, Palestine, Thessalonica, Italy, the Danubian principalities — and came at last to Moscow in April 1653, where Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nikon received him with honour and where he wrote for the Russians an account of the episcopal Liturgy as it was served in the East. On the journey home he fell ill and died at the Transfiguration monastery of Mgar near Lubny in the Ukrainian land, in 1654. He was buried, in the Greek manner, seated in his chair; in 1662 the grave was opened and the body was found incorrupt and still seated, and he was glorified with his feast on May 2. Russian piety knows him as "Athanasius the Sitting" and as the Wonderworker of Lubny, and his relics rested latterly in the Annunciation Cathedral at Kharkov.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Neachtain (5th C)
• Hieromartyr St. Germanus (460)
• St. Gluvias, brother of St. Cadoc (6th C)
• St. Ultan, missionary in East Anglia (686)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings