Ven. Pachomius the Great; Slain Crown Prince Dimitry of Moscow

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Ven. Pachomius the Great

  Pachomius is the father of cenobitic monasticism — the man who took the solitary ascetic life of the Egyptian desert and gave it a common table, a common wardrobe, a common purse, a written Rule and a structure of obedience, and so invented the coenobium, the monastery as the Church has known it ever since. A pagan conscript of the Thebaid, he was shown unasked-for charity by the Christians of Thebes while under guard with his fellow recruits, vowed to serve their God, was baptised at Šeneset, and spent some seven years under the anchorite Palamon. About 323, at the deserted village of Tabennisi, a voice bade him build a monastery, and — the tradition says — an angel delivered him the Rule inscribed on a bronze tablet. At his death in the plague of 348 the koinonia he had founded comprised some nine monasteries and two convents with thousands of monks and nuns; and through Basil, Cassian and Benedict the whole organised monasticism of East and West descends from what he built beside the Nile.

• Saint of the day

  Slain Crown Prince Dimitry of Moscow

• Our Father among the Saints Achillius, Bishop of Larissa (330)

  Achillios, bishop and metropolitan of Larissa in Thessaly, was one of the fathers of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, where he is remembered for his blunt denunciation of Arius and for the sign by which — the tradition says — he silenced the Arian party, commanding oil to flow from a stone. Returning to his city he threw down the temples of the old gods, built and adorned the first churches of Larissa, and was so abundant in healings, and especially in the deliverance of the possessed, that the calendars call him simply the Wonderworker. He reposed in peace about the year 330. In 978 his relics were carried off by the Bulgarian tsar Samuel to the island in the lake of Prespa, which has borne the saint's name ever since; he remains the patron of Larissa, and his memory is kept on May 15.

• Barbarus the Myrrh-streamer

  Barbarus was a brigand of Thessaly who for years lived by robbery, extortion and murder, and who, sitting in his cave among his plunder, was struck by the thought of death and judgement and broke. He confessed his crimes to a village priest, was received, and spent twelve years in the woods as a wild beast — naked, on all fours, eating grass — in expiation. There he was shot by merchants who took the shape in the long grass for game; he died blessing them, asking only that his priest be told, and from his grave there flowed a healing myrrh that gave him his epithet. He is commemorated on May 6, and his relics are kept at the monastery of Kellia near Larissa.

• Demetrius of Uglich

  Demetrius (Dimitry) Ivanovich, youngest son of Ivan IV the Terrible, was born at Moscow in 1582 and died at Uglich on 15 May 1591, aged eight, of a knife-wound in the throat: his mother's family cried murder, the government's commission of inquiry found that he had fallen on his own knife in an epileptic fit, and the question has never been settled. The consequences were enormous — his name was taken up by a succession of impostors who carried the Time of Troubles to the walls of Moscow — and the Church's answer was to glorify him. On 3 June 1606, three weeks after the first false Demetrius was killed, his body was raised at Uglich and carried to the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael in the Kremlin, where it remains. He is honoured not as a martyr for the faith but as a passion-bearer, an innocent child who suffered a violent death without guilt, and as a wonderworker at whose shrine healings were recorded from the day of the translation onward.

• Isaiah of Rostov

  Isaiah was a monk of the Kiev Caves, tonsured by St Theodosius, who was set over the princely monastery of St Demetrius in Kiev and then, about 1077, sent as bishop of Rostov — a see that then covered an enormous and only half-converted territory in the north-east of Rus'. For thirteen years he travelled it with apostolic persistence, preaching against idolatry and sorcery, burning the idols, building churches, and adorning the cathedral of the Dormition at Rostov; the Paterikon remembers him above all as merciful to the poor and a nourisher of orphans. The Kiev Caves tradition relates that an angel bore him to Kiev for the consecration of the Great Church of the Lavra on 14 August 1089, when there had been no time to summon the bishops. He reposed on 15 May 1090, and his relics were found incorrupt in 1164 when the foundations of the new stone cathedral at Rostov were dug. He is one of the three great hierarchs of Rostov — Leontius, Isaiah and Ignatius — and is called the Wonderworker.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Dymphna, martyr of Gheel, near Antwerp (7th C)
• St. Colman MacValaighse, abbot of Oughaval (6th C)
• St. Bercthun, abbot of Beverley (733)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings