Universalis
Friday 3 May 2024    (other days)
Saints Philip and James, Apostles 
Feast

Using calendar: Africa - Southern Africa. You can change this.

The Lord is the King of apostles: come, let us adore him.

Year: B(II). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: Red.

Saints Philip and James, Apostles

Philip was born at Bethsaida and started as a disciple of John the Baptist. After the Baptist’s death he followed Christ.
  James the son of Alphaeus is called “James the Less”, to distinguish him from James the son of Zebedee. James “the brother of the Lord” ruled the Church at Jerusalem; wrote an epistle; led an austere life; and converted many Jews to the Faith. He was crowned with martyrdom in the year 62.
  Jerome held these two Jameses to be the same person, and this was certainly the prevailing opinion when the feast of Philip and James was instituted in 560. Nowadays scholars prefer to divide them, in which case we might think of today as being the feast of Philip and James and James.

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: Tertullian (c.155 - c.240)

Tertullian was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa. Like St Augustine of Hippo some two centuries later, he was of Berber origin. His is the first substantial body of Christian writing in Latin, the language of the western Roman Empire. He played an important part in the shaping of Christian doctrine, which is to say, taking what happened in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and working on understanding it, making sense of it, even inventing the words with which to make sense of it – such as “Trinity”. He was a noted apologist, or explainer of the faith to non-Christians, and in a predominantly pagan world he was insistent against diluting Christianity by compromise with paganism. He eventually found the Catholic Church too lax in its ways and too ready (for example) to forgive those who had apostasized in time of persecution, and he joined the puritan Montanist sect. Nevertheless, his work was an important step in the hammering out of doctrine and St Cyprian referred to him simply as “the Master”.

Liturgical colour: red

Red is the colour of fire and of blood. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate the fire of the Holy Spirit (for instance, at Pentecost) and the blood of the martyrs.

Mid-morning reading (Terce)2 Corinthians 5:19-20
God has entrusted to us the news of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God.

Noon reading (Sext)Acts 5:12,14
Many signs and wonders were worked among the people at the hands of the apostles and the numbers of men and women who came to believe in the Lord increased steadily.

Afternoon reading (None)Acts 5:41-42
The apostles left the presence of the Sanhedrin glad to have had the honour of suffering humiliation for the sake of the name. They preached every day both in the Temple and in private houses, and their proclamation of the Good News of Christ Jesus was never interrupted.

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