Martyr Lupus, Slave of St Demetrius

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Lupus, Slave of St Demetrius

  Lupus was the servant (in the Greek books, the slave) of the Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessalonica, and stood by his master when the soldiers ran him through with their spears in the baths about the year 306. He took from the martyr's hand his ring, and steeped his own garment in the blood that flowed from the wound; and by these two relics, invoking the name of Demetrius, he worked so many healings and wonders in Thessalonica that the whole city was moved. He broke the idols of the pagans, was preserved unhurt through several attempts on his life, and at last gave himself up freely and was beheaded by order of the emperor Maximian Galerius. The Greek calendar keeps him on August 23; the Slavonic and Antiochian books keep him also with his master on October 26.

• Leavetaking of Dormition

• Hieromartyr Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (202)

  Irenaeus, second bishop of Lyons (Lugdunum in Gaul), is the greatest theologian of the second century and the hinge on which the memory of the apostolic age turns. Born at Smyrna about 130–140, he heard Polycarp preach as a boy and never forgot it; carried west into the Greek-speaking colony of the Rhône, he was a presbyter of Lyons during the persecution of 177, was sent to Rome with the confessors' letter while his church died in the amphitheatre, and returned to inherit the widowed see. His five books Against Heresies broke the Gnostic systems and, in breaking them, set out for the first time the whole shape of catholic Christianity: one God who is both Creator and Redeemer, one Christ who recapitulates in himself the whole of Adam's race, one Church holding one rule of faith through the succession of the apostles, and one fourfold Gospel. The Byzantine calendar keeps him on August 23 and calls him hieromartyr, the tradition holding that he was put to the sword at Lyons about 202 under Septimius Severus.

• Hieromartyr Pothinos, Bishop of Lyons (177)

• Callinicus of Constantinople

  Callinicus I was Patriarch of Constantinople from 693 to 705, through the first and most violent reign of Justinian II. A priest of the great shrine church of the Theotokos at Blachernae before his elevation, he is remembered for a single refusal: when the emperor determined to pull down a church of the Mother of God that stood in the way of an extension to his palace and demanded the patriarch's blessing on the demolition, Callinicus answered that he had prayers for the raising of churches and none for their destruction, and — when pressed — gave only the bitter doxology "Glory to God who suffers all things, always, now and ever and unto the ages of ages." The church came down. When Justinian, deposed and mutilated in his turn, returned from exile in 705 to take his revenge, the patriarch was seized, blinded and mutilated, and — the synaxarion says — walled up alive at Rome, where he was found still living after forty days and died four days later. The Church numbers him among the holy hierarchs and keeps his memory on August 23.

• Eutychius and Florentius of Nursia

  Eutychius and Florentius were two monks of the valley of Valcastoria near Nursia in Umbria, in the generation of St Benedict, whose story is preserved by Gregory the Great in the first book of his Dialogues. They shared one small monastery until Eutychius was called away to govern a neighbouring house, and Florentius stayed on alone as a hermit — the one a teacher who won many souls and worked no miracle in his life, the other a simple wonderworker whose prayer brought a bear out of the woods to pasture his sheep. When four envious monks killed the bear, Florentius cursed them and they died of leprosy, and he wept for it for the rest of his life. Eutychius reposed about 540 and Florentius about 547; Eutychius's tunic, carried into the fields in the drought of 1492, brought rain. The Byzantine calendar keeps them together on August 23.

• Irenaeus of Sirmium

  Irenaeus was the young bishop of Sirmium in Pannonia (the modern Sremska Mitrovica), martyred about the year 304 in the Great Persecution of Diocletian. His authentic Acts — one of the more historically secure of the early martyr-records — preserve his examination before the governor Probus and his steadfast confession; he was beheaded and his body cast into the river Save.

• Thirty-eight Martyrs of Thrace

  A company of thirty-eight martyrs who suffered in Thrace and were beheaded. The Greek synaxarion of August 23 keeps their memory in a single line and a distich of verse, and that line is the whole of the record: neither their names, nor the emperor or governor who condemned them, nor the city, nor the year has come down. They stand in the calendar as one of the anonymous companies of the Byzantine martyrology, honoured for the number and the manner of their death and for nothing that can be told about them individually.

British Isles and Ireland

• Holy Martyr Ebba (Æbbe) the Younger, abbess of Coldingham, and her companions (870)
• St. Tydfil, Martyr (480)
• St. Eogan, 1st bishop of Ardstraw (618)

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