16th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Greatmartyr Euphemia the All-Praised

  Euphemia the All-praised (†304) is the great-martyr of Chalcedon, a senator's daughter who suffered under the proconsul Priscus in the last great persecution and died in the arena, wounded by a she-bear after fire, wheel and water had left her unharmed. Her fame rests above all on the miracle of 451: the Fourth Ecumenical Council met in her basilica at Chalcedon, and when the orthodox and the Monophysite definitions of faith were laid in her coffin, she was found holding the orthodox tome — whence she is honoured as the seal and patroness of the Council of Chalcedon. Her relics rest today in the patriarchal church of Saint George at the Phanar in Constantinople. She is commemorated on September 16 (martyrdom) and July 11 (the miracle of 451).

• Holy Hieromartyr Cyprian of Carthage (258)

• St Ninian, Enlightener of Scotland (432)

• Our Holy Father Dorotheos the Solitary of Egypt (4th c.)

• David of Thessalonica

  David the Dendrite is the most beloved of the ascetics of Thessalonica and one of the best documented of the tree-dwelling hermits of the Christian East. A Mesopotamian by birth who came west as a young monk to the monastery of the holy martyrs Theodore and Mercurius outside the city walls, he refused to be made abbot and instead climbed into an almond tree beside the church, where he lived exposed to sun, frost and rain for three years until an angel bade him come down. From the cell he then occupied he healed, exorcised, counselled and prophesied for decades. In extreme old age he was sent as the city's ambassador to the emperor Justinian at Constantinople to plead that Thessalonica not be stripped of the prefecture of Illyricum; there he carried live coals and incense in his bare hands before the emperor and the senate without being burned, and won his city's cause. He died on the voyage home, about 540, within sight of the Thessalonian shore, having accomplished exactly the "one last work of love" the angel had foretold.

• Dorotheus the Hermit of Egypt

  Dorotheus (4th century), called the Theban from his birthplace in the Thebaid, was an Egyptian hermit who pursued for some sixty years one of the most unbending ascetic regimes recorded of the desert fathers. In the midday heat he gathered stones by the sea to build cells for other hermits; by night he wove ropes and baskets of palm for his bread; he ate almost nothing, never lay down to sleep, and answered those who asked why he so wore out his body: "It kills me; I kill it." His young disciple Palladius, later bishop of Helenopolis, preserved his memory in the Lausiac History. He reposed in peace at a great age and is commemorated on September 16.

• Edward the Martyr

  Edward the Martyr (c. 962 – 978) was King of the English for less than three years, and a saint of the undivided Church of the West before the Great Schism. The elder son of the reforming King Edgar the Peaceable, he came young to the throne in 975 amid a bitter succession dispute, and on 18 March 978 was murdered at Corfe in Dorset, at the estate of his stepmother Ælfthryth — cut down by armed retainers as he sat unsuspecting on his horse, having ridden to visit his young half-brother Æthelred, who succeeded him. Buried without honour at Wareham, his body was found incorrupt and translated with great reverence to Shaftesbury Abbey, which became the centre of a fervent cult; miracles were reported at his tomb, and within a generation the murdered king was venerated throughout England as a martyr. The Orthodox Church keeps him on March 18, honouring him among the passion-bearers — an innocent whose unjust death was borne, and crowned, as a witness. He is not to be confused with Edward the Confessor (†1066), the later English king-saint.

• Ludmila of Bohemia

  Ludmila (c. 860–921) was the first Christian princess of Bohemia, wife of Bořivoj I, and the grandmother and first teacher of Wenceslaus (Václav), the Czech prince and passion-bearer. Baptized with her husband by Methodius, Archbishop of Moravia and Enlightener of the Slavs, she spent her long widowhood building up the infant Czech Church, and raised her grandson in the faith. In the regency struggle that followed her son's death, her pagan- leaning daughter-in-law Drahomíra had her strangled at her retreat of Tetín on the night of September 15–16, 921. The first martyr of the Czech lands and patroness of Bohemia, she is venerated across the Orthodox world, especially in the Czech and Russian churches, on September 16.

• Melitina of Marcianopolis

  Melitina was a martyr of Marcianopolis in Lower Moesia (near modern Devnya, Bulgaria) who suffered in the reign of Antoninus Pius (138–161) — one of the comparatively few martyrs transmitted from that mild emperor's time. A bold confessor whose preaching drew pagans to Christ, she is said to have shattered the idols of Apollo and Herakles by her prayer and to have converted the wife of her persecutor, the governor Antiochus, before both women were beheaded. A Macedonian Christian named Akakios obtained her body and died at sea carrying it home; both were buried on the island of Lemnos. She is commemorated on September 16.

• Sebastiana of Heraclea

  Sebastiana is venerated as a disciple of the Apostle Paul who won the martyr's crown in old age under the emperor Domitian (81–96). Tried first at Marcianopolis in Moesia, where she emerged unharmed from a burning furnace, she was sent to Heraclea in Thrace, tortured again, given to the beasts — which would not touch her — and finally beheaded. Her body, cast into the sea, was carried by the tradition's account to an island shore and honourably buried. As one of the last living links to the apostolic generation, she is commemorated on September 16.

• Edith of Wilton

  Edith (Eadgyth, c. 961–984) was the daughter of King Edgar of England and of St Wilfrida of Wilton, born of the union the king made when he took Wilfrida from the nunnery of Wilton; her mother returned there with the infant, and Edith spent her whole short life within that community, taking the veil young and refusing the abbacies — and, tradition adds, the crown — that her birth offered her. Famed for her generosity to the poor and her gentleness with animals, she built at Wilton a chapel of St Denis, consecrated by St Dunstan, who wept and foretold her approaching death; she reposed on 16 September 984, about twenty-three years old, and became one of the best-loved saints of late Anglo-Saxon England.

• Ninian of Whithorn

  Ninian (Latin Nynia; in Scotland Ringan, in northern England Trynnian) is the first named apostle of what is now Scotland: a Briton, instructed at Rome according to Bede, who as bishop established his see at Whithorn in Galloway — Candida Casa, "the White House," so called because he built there a church of stone, unusual among the Britons — dedicated it to St Martin of Tours, and by his preaching turned the southern Picts from idolatry to the faith of Christ. He was buried in his church at Whithorn, which grew into a monastery, a school of saints for Britain and Ireland, and the great pilgrimage shrine of medieval Galloway. His traditional day is September 16; the year of his repose, c. 432, is late tradition.

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