Easter Tuesday
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- (Saint Francis of Paola (1436 - 1507))
- He was born in Paola in Calabria. He founded an order of hermits which later became the Order of Minims (“minimi,” meaning “least,” because they were to be the least of the religious orders). He died on Good Friday, 2 April 1507, at Plessis in France. See the article in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.
- (St John Payne (c.1550-1582))
- John Payne (or Paine) was born in Peterborough into a Church of England family but in his early adult life became a Catholic. He went to the English College at Douai in 1574 and was ordained priest in 1576; the short time he was at the college may suggest that he had studied theology elsewhere. He returned to England in the company of Cuthbert Mayne (1st December). He went to Essex where he stayed at the home of the Petre family in Ingatestone Hall. From here he ministered to local Catholics, while apparently working as an estate steward. In 1577 he was imprisoned for a short time, afterwards returning briefly to Douai. He came back to Essex and continued working as a priest until in 1581 he was once again arrested. He was imprisoned at Greenwich, being charged with conspiracy against the Queen, was racked in the Tower, and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. He denied the evidence brought against him completely, stating at his trial “that he always, in mind or word, honoured the queen’s majesty above any woman in the world; that he would gladly always have spent his life for her pleasure in any lawful service; that he prayed for her as for his own soul; that he never invented or compassed any treason against her majesty, or any of the nobility of England.” He was executed at Chelmsford on 2 April. He was so well known and respected in the neighbourhood that the crowd compelled the hangman to wait until he was dead before cutting him down.
- (Blessed Pedro Calungsod (- 1672))
- He was a teen-aged native of the Visayas region of the Philippines, one of the boy catechists who went with some Spanish Jesuit missionaries from the Philippines to the Ladrones Islands – later renamed “Marianas” – in the western Pacific in 1668, to evangelize the Chamorros. On 2 April 1672, while helping Fr Diego Luis de San Vitores, the rector of the Mission, to recover a runaway servant and to perform some baptisms at the village of Tomhon on the Island of Guam, he was killed by two natives for being a Christian, for catechizing the Chamorros and for helping in the administration of the Sacrament of Baptism. His body was thrown into deep ocean together with that of the rector, who was also killed after him.
He was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on 21 October 2012.