Trans. Rel. Protomartyr Stephen; Bl. Vasily, Fool-for-Christ

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Trans. Rel. Protomartyr Stephen

  Stephen the Protomartyr (†c. 34) was the first of the seven deacons chosen by the Apostles and the first Christian to die for Christ. "Full of faith and of the Holy Spirit," he worked wonders among the people, confounded the Hellenist synagogues in debate, and, arraigned before the Sanhedrin on a charge of blasphemy, delivered the longest speech in the Acts of the Apostles before beholding "the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." Stoned outside Jerusalem with the young Saul consenting, he died praying for his killers. His relics, hidden for centuries, were uncovered at Kaphar Gamala in 415. His chief feast is December 27; the uncovering of his relics is kept on September 15 and their translation to Constantinople on August 2.

• Saint of the day

  Bl. Vasily, Fool-for-Christ

  Basil of Kamen was a fool-for-Christ of the Saviour-Kamenny monastery, which stood on a single rock of an island in Lake Kubenskoye north of Vologda — the oldest monastery of the Russian North. He is placed between the end of the seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth, wore heavy iron chains and a cap made of strips of iron, and was buried in the monastery, where his relics rested in a wooden shrine in a church dedicated to Basil the Blessed of Moscow — the coincidence of name that gave him his place on August 2. When the great fire of 1774 destroyed most of the monastery, his wooden reliquary and his icon were found unburnt, and his local veneration dates from that deliverance.

• Hieromartyr Stephen, Pope of Rome (257), and those with him

  Stephen, bishop of Rome from 254 to 257, governed the Roman church in the uneasy peace before the persecution of Valerian and is remembered in the East as a hieromartyr who was seized and beheaded in the catacombs on 2 August 257. His pontificate is chiefly remembered for two things: the long labour of readmitting to communion those who had fallen away or been ordained in schism — against the rigorism of the Novatianists, who denied that the lapsed could ever be received back — and the sharp controversy with Cyprian of Carthage and the African and Asian bishops over whether converts baptised by heretics must be baptised again. The Byzantine synaxaria commemorate him with a company of martyrs converted or ordained by him: the tribune Nemesius and his daughter Lucilla, the steward Symphronius, the tribune Olympius with his wife Exuperia and their son Theodolus, and twelve of his clergy.

• Abibas

  Abibas was the younger son of the teacher of the Law Gamaliel, baptised with his father by the Apostles Peter and John, and dead at about twenty years of age, still — the tradition insists — in the white robe of the newly-illumined. His father buried him in the family tomb at Kaphar Gamala outside Jerusalem, where the body of the Protomartyr Stephen already lay and where Nicodemus and Gamaliel himself would afterwards be laid. In 415 the four were discovered together through the vision granted to the priest Lucian, and the Church has kept their memory on August 2 ever since. Almost nothing else is transmitted of him: he is the youngest and the quietest of the four, and his whole recorded life is a baptism, an early death and a grave in good company.

• Basil of Moscow

  Basil the Blessed (†1557) is the most famous of all the Russian fools-for-Christ: a cobbler's apprentice from the village of Yelokhovo who at sixteen laid aside craft, clothing and shelter, and for some seventy years walked the streets of Moscow naked and bound with iron, in frost and in summer heat, exposing fraud in the marketplace, giving away what was given him, and rebuking the great — Ivan the Terrible not excepted — to their faces. He reposed on 2 August 1557; the Tsar himself is said to have helped carry his bier, and Metropolitan Macarius buried him beside the church of the Trinity in the Moat. A Council under Patriarch Job glorified him in 1588, and a chapel was raised over his relics at the north-east corner of the new Pokrov cathedral on Red Square — which from that day the people have called, and the world still calls, St Basil's.

• Gamaliel the Elder

  Gamaliel — Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, grandson of Hillel and the most honoured teacher of the Law in Jerusalem in his generation — is the Pharisee who stood up in the Sanhedrin and argued that the apostles should be let alone, "for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought; but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it" (Acts 5:38–39); and he is the master at whose feet Saul of Tarsus was brought up (Acts 22:3). Christian tradition holds that he came secretly to faith in Christ, was baptised with his son Abibas by the Apostles Peter and John, sheltered Nicodemus when the Sanhedrin cast him out, and gave burial in his own estate at Kaphar Gamala to the body of the Protomartyr Stephen. In the year 415 he appeared in a vision to the priest Lucian and revealed the tomb where all four of them lay; the Church keeps the finding of the relics on August 2.

• Nicodemus the Righteous

  Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, a member of the Sanhedrin, who came to Jesus by night to ask about the Kingdom and received from Him the teaching on being born again of water and the Spirit (John 3). He appears twice more in the Fourth Gospel: pleading in the council that the Law does not condemn a man unheard (John 7:50–51), and coming at last into the open on Great Friday with a hundred pound weight of myrrh and aloes to help Joseph of Arimathea take the body of the Lord from the Cross and lay it in the tomb (John 19:39–42). Tradition has him baptised by the Apostles Peter and John, expelled from the Sanhedrin and driven from Jerusalem, and sheltered in the country house of the teacher Gamaliel, in whose tomb at Kaphar Gamala his relics were found together with those of the Protomartyr Stephen in the year 415.

• Photeine of Cyprus

  Photeine — known throughout the Karpasia peninsula by the affectionate diminutive Agia Photou — was a village girl of Rizokarpaso in north-eastern Cyprus who left her home for a cave near the village of Agios Andronikos and spent the rest of her life there in fasting, prayer and silence. Her hermitage, reached by twenty-three stone steps cut down into the rock like an early Christian catacomb, has a spring of water at its floor which the faithful use for healing, and Photeine is invoked especially for diseases of the eyes — a patronage her name (phōs, light) made inevitable. Her relics were found between 1718 and 1732 with an inscription naming her a bride of Christ, and a portion is kept at the Monastery of Kykkos. Her dates are not transmitted.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Etheldritha of Crowland, virgin (c.835)
• St. Sidwell, Virgin-Martyr (6th C)
• St. Plegmund, 19th archbishop of Canterbury (914)

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