Repose of St. John of Kronstadt

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Repose of Our Holy Father John of Kronstadt (1908)

  John of Kronstadt (1829–1908) was the most celebrated Russian pastor of his age — a married parish priest of the naval city of Kronstadt, near Saint Petersburg, who for over half a century served the daily Liturgy, gave himself without reserve to the poor and the outcast, and became known across the Russian Empire as a wonderworker whose prayers healed the sick and to whom thousands came for confession and counsel. From his cathedral of Saint Andrew he founded a great House of Industry for the destitute, drew crowds so vast that he introduced a form of general confession aloud, and made frequent Communion the heart of his teaching; his spiritual diary, My Life in Christ, became a classic of Orthodox devotion. He reposed on December 20, 1908, and was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1964 and by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1990.

• Antiochian commemoration

  Ignatius of Antioch

  Ignatius the God-bearer (c. 35 – c. 107) was bishop of Antioch — the third to hold the see, after the Apostle Peter and Evodus — and, with Polycarp of Smyrna, a disciple of the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian. Tradition identifies him with the child whom Christ set in the midst of the disciples, and reads his name "Theophoros," God-bearer, in both its senses: one borne in the arms of God, and one who bore God in his heart. Arrested under the emperor Trajan and condemned to the beasts, he was sent under military guard across Asia Minor to Rome — a journey on which, chained to "ten leopards," he wrote the seven letters that are his enduring monument: a foundational witness to the bishop's office, to the Eucharist as "the medicine of immortality," and to a martyrdom he embraced with longing — "I am the wheat of God, and I am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." He was devoured by beasts in the amphitheatre at Rome about the year 107. His relics were carried back to Antioch — the first stage of their journey — and later translated to Rome, to the Basilica of San Clemente, where they rest. He is kept on December 20, and on January 29 for the translation of his relics.

• Forefeast of Nativity

• Hieromartyr Ignatius the Godbearer

• Philogonius of Antioch

  Philogonius (†c. 324) was bishop of Antioch from about 319 to 324, a defender of the Nicene faith at the very outset of the Arian controversy and a confessor who had stood firm through the last of the pagan persecutions. A lawyer before his episcopate — famed, the tradition says, for defending the poor, the widow, and the orphan — he was raised to the See of Antioch after the death of his wife, and governed it in the difficult years when Arius's teaching first divided the East, opposing the heresy before the Council of Nicaea had met. He is remembered above all because John Chrysostom, preaching at Antioch some sixty years later, delivered a celebrated homily in his praise. He is commemorated on December 20, together with Ignatius the God-bearer.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Urscinus, disciple of St. Columbanus and abbot of St. Ursanne (625)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings