The Shepherd, July 2008
THE COMING MONTH
JULY is a Mid-Summer month and we have, as it were, a pause. We have completed the period of the Pentecostarion, and the subsequent festivals of All Saints and the various celebrations of groups of local saints. August will bring us the Great Feasts of the Transfiguration and the Dormition, and the commemoration of the Beheading of St John the Baptist. In that month too we have the fourteen day fast in preparation for the Dormition.
In July, as it were, we have a lull. There are no Great Feasts, no special fasts, except the weekly round of Wednesday and Friday fasting, but we do have a beautiful array of saints to celebrate. One, the Great Martyr Marina (17th / 30th), we have noted already in this issue, by including an account of the recent miracle that she worked for a family in Greece. Among the lesser known ones we also have:-
The Holy Martyr Lucy and the martyred King Austius (6th /19th July). In the Roman Empire, there were many areas which had local, client kings, like Herod in the Holy Land. Austius was one of these in Campania. Lucy (not the Virgin Martyr, whom we celebrate in December, but another) was taken as a captive by this king, who desired to make her his concubine. However, on account of her Christian faith, Lucy protested and, impressed by her courage and her steadfastness, Austius did not force her, but permitted her to live a life of ascetic struggle without molestation. Through her steadfastness Lucy brought Austius to the Christian Faith, and very near the end of the persecutions by the Roman Emperors, in about the year 300, both she and Austius were slain for their Christian profession in Rome.
St Clement of Ochrid (27th July / 9th August) was one of the five closest disciples of the Holy Peers of the Apostles, Methodius and Cyril, the teachers of the Slavs. After the repose of St Methodius, they were forced to abandon Moravia by the Germans who were already enforcing the use of the filioque and endorsing practices and ideas which eventually came to characterize medieval Roman Catholicism. The Five settled south of the River Danube, and founded a monastery at Belica, from which St Clement cared for the mission as its Bishop. Later he moved to Ochrid, where he erected a church to Saint Panteleimenon, and from whence he directed his immense missionary activities. He was known as a miracle-worker and a healer even during his lifetime, and he reposed in the Lord in 916 A.D. His wonder-working relics were placed in the church of the Theotokos, which, because of his renown and the many miracles worked there, was later re-dedicated to him.
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