Santorale anglicano

[Dreyer]

Mi piacerebbe, se i moderatori son d'accordo, aprire qui in questo forum un 3d dove, giorno per giorno, inserire le brevi biografie dei "santi" (lo metto fra virgolette perchè alcuni sono cattolici, altri no) venerati nei rispettivi giorni dalla Comunione anglicana nelle liturgie.

Se mi date l'assenso lo incomincerei, mi pare che stia meglio qui in Agiografia che non in CR

[Augustinus]

Va bene, caro Dreyer.
L'unica cosa è che è per i c.d. "santi" - che non sono tali per la Chiesa Cattolica - si precisi che sono così denominati in modo improprio. E dunque vengano usate le virgolette.

[Dreyer]

January 1, 2006

The Naming and Circumcision of Our Lord Jesus Christ

[Dreyer]

January 2

Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops, 379 and 389

Gregory of Nazianzus, his friend Basil the Great, and Basil's brother Gregory
of Nyssa, are jointly known as the Cappadocian Fathers (Cappadocia is a
region in what is now Central Turkey).
Gregory lived in a turbulent time. In 312, Constantine, having won a battle that made him Emperor of the West, issued a decree that made it no longer a crime to be a Christian. In 325 he summoned a council of Bishops at Nicea, across the straits from Byzantium (Constantinople, Istanbul), to settle the dispute between those (led by Athanasius) who taught that the Logos (the "Word" of John 1:1, who "was made flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth) was completely God, in the same sense in which the Father is God, and those (led by Arius) who taught that the Logos is a being created by God the Father. The bishops assembled at Nicea declared that the view of Athanasius was that which they had received from their predecessors as the true Faith handed down from the Apostles.
The Arians did not accept defeat quietly. They created a sufficient disturbance so that Constantine, at first inclined to support the decision of the Council, decided that peace could best be obtained by adopting a Creed which simply evaded the issue. After his death in 336, he was succeeded by various of his relatives, some of whom sided with the Athanasians and some with the Arians, and one of whom (Julian the Apostate, Emperor 361-363) attempted to restore paganism as the religion of the Empire. The situation was complicated by the fact that missionaries to the Goths were first sent out in large numbers during the reign of an Arian Emperor, with the result that the Goths were converted to Arian Christianity. Since the professional Army was composed chiefly of Goth mercenaries, and the Army held the balance of power, this was a real problem.

Gregory of Nazianzus was born about 330. He went to school in Athens with
his friend Basil, and with the aforesaid Julian. He and Basil compiled an
anthology, called the PHILOKALIA, of the works of the great (but somewhat
erratic) Alexandrian theologian, philosopher, and scholar of the previous
century, Origen. Later, he went home to assist his father, a bishop, in his
struggles against Arianism. Meanwhile, his friend Basil had become
Archbishop of (Cappadocian) Caesarea. Faced with a rival Arian bishop at
Tyana, he undertook to consolidate his position by maneuvering Gregory into
the position of Bishop of Sasima, an unhealthy settlement on the border
between the two jurisdictions. Gregory called Sasima "a detestable little place
without water or grass or any mark of civilization." He felt "like a bone flung
to dogs." He refused to reside at Sasima. Basil accused him of shirking his
duty. He accused Basil of making him a pawn in ecclesiastical politics. Their
friendship suffered a severe breach, which took some time to heal. Gregory
suffered a breakdown and retired to recuperate.
In 379, after the death of the Arian Emperor Valens, Gregory was asked to go
to Constantinople to preach there. For thirty years, the city had been controlled
by Arians or pagans, and the orthodox did not even have a church there.
Gregory went. He converted his own house there into a church and held
services in it. There he preached the Five Theological Orations for which he is
best known, a series of five sermons on the Trinity and in defense of the deity
of Christ. People flocked to hear him preach, and the city was largely won over to the Athanasian (Trinitarian, catholic, orthodox) position by his powers of persuasion. The following year, he was consecrated bishop of Constantinople. He presided at the Council of Constantinple in 381, which confirmed the Athanasian position of the earlier Council of Nicea in 325. Having accomplished what he believed to be his mission at Constantinople, and heartily sick of ecclesiastical politics, Gregory resigned and retired to his home town of Nazianzus, where he died in 389.

Basil was born in Caesarea of Cappadocia, a province in what is now central
Turkey (more or less directly north of the easternmost part of the
Mediterranean, but with no seacoast). He was born in 329, after the
persecution of Christians had ceased, but with parents who could remember
the persecutions and had lived through them. He originally planned to become
a lawyer and orator, and studied at Athens (351-356), where two of his
classmates were Gregory of Nazianzus (who became a close friend) and the
future Emperor Julian the Apostate. When he returned home, the influence and example of his sister Macrina led him to seek the monastic life instead, and after making a tour of the monasteries of Egypt in 357, he founded a monastic settlement near his home. He remained there only five years, but the influence of his community was enormous. Whereas in the West there are numerous monastic orders (Benedictines, Carthusians, etc.), in the East all monks are Basilian monks. His Longer Rules and Shorter Rules for the monastic life remain the standard. Basil expresses a definite preference for the communal life of the monastery over the solitary life of the hermit, arguing that the Christian life of mutual love and service is communal by its nature. In 367-8, when Cappadocia suffered a severe and widespread famine, Basil sold his family's
very extensive land holdings in order to buy food for the starving, persuading
many others to follow his example, and putting on an apron to work in the
soup kitchen himself. In this crisis, he absolutely refused to allow any
distinction to be made between Jew and Christian, saying that the digestive
systems of the two are indistinguishable. He also built a hospital for the care of the sick, housing for the poor, and a hospice for travelers.
These were the years between the First Ecumenical Council (Nicea, 325) and
the Second (Constantinople, 381), years in which it was uncertain whether the Church would stand by the declaration made at Nicea that the Logos (the
"Word" -- see John 1:1) was fully God, equally with the Father, or seek a more flexible formula in the hope of reconciliation with the Arians, who declared themselves unalterably opposed to the Nicene wording. Basil had been ordained priest in 362 in order to assist the new Bishop of Caesarea, whom he succeeded in 370. (Since Caesarea was the capital, or metropolis, of the province of Cappadocia, its bishop was automatically the metropolitan of
Cappadocia, which included about fifty dioceses (bishoprics). A metropolitan
was roughly what we would call an archbishop, although in ancient
terminology an "archbishop" was one step above a metropolitan.) By that time, an Arian emperor, Valens, was ruling. Basil made it his policy to try to unite the so-called semi-Arians with the Nicene party against the outright Arians, making use of the formula "three persons (hypostases) in one substance (ousia)," thus explicitly acknowledging a distinction between the Father and the Son (a distinction that the Nicene party had been accused of blurring), and at the same time insisting on their essential unity.

When the emperor Valens passed through Caesarea in 371, he demanded the
theological submission of Basil, who flatly refused. The imperial prefect
expressed astonishment at Basil's defiance, to which Basil replied, "Perhaps
you have never met a real bishop before." Valens retaliated by dividing the
province of Cappadocia into two provinces, with the result that the Arian
Bishop of Tyana became metropolitan of the new province of Western
Cappadocia. Basil responded by going political. He ramrodded his brother
Gregory of Nyssa and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus into bishoprics that they
did not want, and for which they were totally unsuited, so that he would have
the votes of those bishoprics when he needed them. (Neither Gregory ever
quite forgave him for this.) His interests were not exclusively theological: he
denounced and excommunicated those who owned houses of prostitution, he
worked to secure justice for the poor against those who oppressed them, and
he severely disciplined clergy who used their office to accumulate money or to
live too well at the expense of the faithful.

His most famous writings include the Hexaemeron ("The Six Days"), a series
of nine sermons on the days of creation, in which he speaks of the beauties of the created world as revelations of the splendor of God. His Against Eunomius defends the deity of Christ against an Arian writer, and his On The Holy Spirit speaks of the deity of the Third Person of the Trinity, and the rightness of worshipping Him together with the Father and the Son. In his Address To Young Men (originally written for his nephews), he urges Christians to make themselves acquainted with pagan philosophy and literature, arguing that this will often lead to a deeper understanding of Christian truth. His personality comes through most clearly in his letters, of which more than three hundred have been preserved. Some deal with points of theology or ethics, some with canon law, and many simply with everyday affairs. Ten times a year the Eastern churches use the Liturgy of St. Basil rather than the more usual Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. It differs chiefly in having a more elaborate Anaphora (the prayer of consecration offered over the bread and wine), expressing some of his characteristic turns of thought, probably dating back to his time and used by him, and possibly composed by him personally.
Basil died in 379, shortly after the death in battle of the Arian Valens removed
the chief threat to the Nicene faith to which Basil had devoted his life. He was mourned by the entire city, and the weeping crowds at his funeral included Christians, Jews, and pagans. [James Kiefer]

[Dreyer]

January 3

Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah, Bishop in South India, Evangelist, 1945

Samuel Azariah was born in 1874 in a small village in South India, his father,
Thomas Vedanayagam being a simple village priest and his mother Ellen
having a deep love and understanding of the Scriptures. Samuel became a
YMCA evangelist whilst still only nineteen, and secretary of the organisation
throughout South India a few years later. He saw that, for the Church in India
to grow and attract ordinary Indians to the Christian faith, it had to have an
indigenous leadership and reduce the strong western influences and almost
totally white leadership that pervaded it. He was ordained priest at the age of
thirty-five and bishop just three years later, his work moving from primary
evangelism to forwarding his desire for more Indian clergy and the need to
raise their educational standards. He was an avid ecumenist and was one of the first to see the importance to mission of a united Church. He died on 1 January 1945, just two years before the creation of a united Church of South India.

[Dreyer]

January 6

The Epiphany

[Dreyer]

January 8

The First Sunday after Epiphany

[Dreyer]

January 10

William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1645

William Laud, born in 1573, was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 to 1645
in the days of King Charles I. It was a turbulent time throughout, one of
violent divisions in the Church of England, eventually culminating in the
English Civil War.

An example is the surplice controversy. We have all encountered Christians
who are opposed to celebrating Christmas on the grounds that (a) the Bible
nowhere commands us to celebrate Christmas, and does not mention the 25th
of December; and (b) the pagans had a festival in December at which they built fires and feasted and exchanged gifts, from which it follows that those who celebrate Christmas are participating in pagan rites. Similarly, in the late 1500's and early 1600's, there were Christians in England who objected to the garment called the surplice. When participating in the services of Morning and Evening Prayer in Church, clergy, including choir members, normally wore a cassock (a black, floor-length, fairly tight-fitting garment) covered by a surplice (a white, knee-length, fairly loose garment with loose sleeves). The Puritans objected to the surplice (a) as not mentioned in the Bible, and (b) as something that the Roman Catholics had worn before the Reformation, which made it one of the props of idolatrous worship, and marked anyone who wore it as an idolater.

Archbishop Laud regarded it as a seemly, dignified garment, an appropriate
response to the Apostle Paul's injunction, "Let all things be done decently and
in order." The Puritans stood by their objections, and violently interrupted
services at which the surplice was worn. On one occasion, a group of Puritans
broke into an Oxford chapel the night before a service and stole the surplices,
which they thrust into a the dung-pit of a privy. Again, a woman marched into
Lichfield Cathedral, accompanied by the town clerk and his wife, and ruined
the altar hangings with a bucket of pitch.

Under English Law, it was part of Laud's office as Archbishop to maintain
order and to punish offences against the peace of the Church. He made it his
practice to proceed not only against poor and obscure offenders, but also,
perhaps especially, against rich and powerful ones. It is well that men should be equal before the law, but his integrity on this point ultimately cost Laud his
life.

Laud was also the prosecutor of record in the trials of those who published
seditious or violent and abusive attacks on the doctrine and discipline of the
Church, and the Puritans produced an abundance of scurrilous attacks on those who disagreed with them, which were duly punished, with Laud taking the responsibility. In 1630 (before Laud became Archbishop), when Alexander
Leighton published Zion's Plea Against Prelacy, a violent attack on the Bishops
as tools of Antichrist, he was sentenced to be publicly whipped and branded,
and to have his ears cut off. He was sixty years old and a Doctor of Divinity,
and the sentence aroused great public indignation. (It is not certain that it was actually carried out.)

Laud made enemies chiefly in three ways. (1) He punished those who attacked the Church, both those who vandalized and those who merely scolded. (2) He upheld various customs in public worship (such as the wearing of the surplice) that were harmless in themselves, but which aroused the suspicion and fury of those whe feared a return to power of Roman Catholicism. (3) He sought the financial independence of the clergy, so that a preacher was not dependent on what support the local squire was pleased to give him. His proposed means to this end was to restore to the Church some of the Church lands that had been seized by Henry VIII and given or sold to various nobles and gentlemen. The proposal never reached the stage of discussion about details, so it was not clear how compensation would be handled, but the mere whisper of such a proposal was enough to make every landholder in the country feel personally threatened.

In 1637 an attempt was made to introduce the Book of Common Prayer into
general use in Scotland, and it immediately caused rioting. In February of
1638, Scottish leaders signed the National Covenant, by which they pledged
themselves to uphold the Puritan position by force, and by the end of the year they had voted to depose and excommunicate every bishop in Scotland. The unrest spread to England, and in 1640 Laud was arrested on a charge of high treason. He was kept in the Tower for four years, and tried in 1644, at the age of seventy-one. He was found guilty, not because there was any evidence of his guilt, but because the House of Commons was determined that he should die.

On the scaffold he prayed: "The Lord receive my soul, and have mercy on me,
and bless this kingdom with peace and charity, that there may not be this
effusion of Christian blood amongst them."

[Dreyer]

January 11

Mary Slessor, Missionary in West Africa, 1915

Mary Slessor was born into a working-class, Presbyterian family in Aberdeen
in 1848. As a child in Dundee, she was enthralled by stories of missions in
Africa. For years, she read diligently as she worked in the mills, and eventually, in 1875, she was accepted as a teacher for the mission in Calabar, Nigeria. Her fluency in the local language, physical resilience and lack of pretension endeared her to those to whom she ministered. She adopted unwanted children, particularly twins who would otherwise, according to local
superstition, have been put to death. She was influential in organising trade and in settling disputes, contributing much to the development of the Okoyong people with whom she later settled. She died, still in Africa, on this day in 1915.

[Dreyer]

January 12

Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx, 1167

Aelred was born in 1109 at Durham, and was sent to the Scottish court for an
education that would ensure his future as a noble and courtier. He succeeded, to the extent of being made Master of the Household of the King of Scotland.
Nevertheless, he found success at the court of an earthly king unsatisfying, and at the age of 24 he entered the Cistercian monastery at Rievaulx in Yorkshire.
Bernard of Clairvaux encouraged him to write his first work, The Mirror of
Charity, which deals with seeking to follow the example of Christ in all things.
In 1147 he became abbot of Rievaulx, a post which he held until his death of
kidney disease twenty years later at the age of 57.
His most famous work is called Spiritual Friendship. When Jesus was told that
his family was waiting to see him, he replied, "All who do the will of my Father
are my family." From this, some Christians have drawn the conclusion that the
only kind of love permissible to a Christian is Charity -- that is: (a) the
universal benevolence that wills the good of all persons, and (b) the bond that unites the Christian with Christ and through Christ with all other Christians.
Note that Universal Belevolence is extended equally to all persons (we are to
love Jones because God made him), and that the bond of Christian Unity unites us equally with all our fellow Christians who are in a state of grace (we are to love Jones because Christ dwells in him). Neither leaves any room for
particular friendships, for liking Jones more than Smith because Jones shares
our interest in hockey, or because Jones and we like the same sort of jokes, or come from the same part of the country and have similar childhood memories, or because Jones is an easy-going type and it is easy to relax and feel comfortable around him, or because Jones and we have a special bond of
friendship, loyalty, and trust. Particular friendships are OUT!
Some who do not think that every Christian must renounce particular
friendships believe that every monastic must do so. In many religious houses,
where the monks or nuns walk two by two into chapel or the dining hall or
while pacing about during the daily hour of recreation, the superior will make a
point of constantly shifting partners, lest anyone form a liking for one partner
more than another. (This does not apply just to friends. It is sometimes held
that no monk ought to allow himself any preferences in food or drink.) Against
this view, Aelred wrote that it is compatible with the highest degree of
Christian perfection to take special pleasure in the company of particular
friends. He point out that we are told that Jesus loved John, and Mary, and
Martha, and Lazarus, and that this probably means that he found their company congenial.