St Paul the Confessor of Constantinople

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  St Paul the Confessor of Constantinople

  Paul the Confessor (died c. 350) was archbishop of Constantinople during the height of the Arian crisis, a firm champion of the Nicene faith who was four times driven from his see by the emperor Constantius II and the Arian party. In his final banishment he was carried off to Cucusus in Armenia and there, the tradition holds, strangled with his own omophorion as he stood at the altar — so that the Church honours under the title "Confessor" a hierarch who in the end sealed his witness with a martyr's death. His secretaries, the notaries Marcian and Martyrius, were killed for continuing his cause. His feast is November 6.

• Saint Germanus, Archbishop of Kazan (1568)

• Barlaam of Khutyn

  Barlaam of Khutyn (died 1192) was the founder of the Monastery of the Transfiguration at Khutyn on the river Volkhov and one of the most beloved wonderworkers of the Russian North. A nobleman's son of Novgorod, he became a monk in his youth, withdrew to a lonely and ill-reputed hill outside the city, and there gathered a brotherhood by the example of his ceaseless prayer, severe fasting, and hard manual labour. Endowed with clairvoyance and a wide fame for miracles — chief among them a summer frost he foretold to save the harvest — he reposed on November 6, 1192. He is venerated as a heavenly protector of Great Novgorod, and his relics rest in the monastery he founded.

• Herman of Kazan

  Herman of Kazan (sixteenth century, died 1567) was a monk of the school of Joseph of Volokolamsk who became the first abbot of the Dormition monastery of Sviyazhsk and, from 1564, the second archbishop of the newly Christian region of Kazan. A learned copyist of books and a builder of churches and monastic libraries, he laboured to enlighten the Muslim and heathen peoples of the middle Volga. Summoned by Ivan the Terrible in 1566 to be metropolitan of Moscow, he dared to rebuke the Tsar's cruelties, was cast into disgrace, and died at Moscow on November 6, 1567. His relics were later enshrined at Sviyazhsk, and his repose is his principal feast.

• Luke of Taormina

  Luke of Taormina (died c. 820) was a Sicilian ascetic of the age when the island was still Byzantine and its monasticism flourishing. A native of Tauromenium (modern Taormina), he forsook his parents and betrothed in his youth for the wilderness, spent long years in fasting and prayer on the slopes of Mount Etna, and in his old age, prompted by a revelation, founded a monastery, travelling to learn the usages of other houses. He fell asleep at Corinth. He is commemorated on November 6 among the venerable fathers, a minor but universal synaxarion memory.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Mellion (6th C)
• St. Edwen (7th C)
• St. Efflam (c.700)
• St. Winoc (717)
• All Saints of Ireland
• St. Cowey of Portaferry, Abbot of Moville (8th C)
• St. Illtyd, abbot of Llanilltyd Fawr (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

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