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Wednesday of the 3rd week of Lent 
 (optional commemoration of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, Martyrs)

Using calendar: Eastern Mediterranean. You can choose a country.

Christ the Lord was tempted and suffered for us. Come, let us adore him.
Or: O that today you would listen to his voice: harden not your hearts.

Year: C(I). Psalm week: 3. Liturgical Colour: Violet.

Saints Marcellinus and Peter (- 304)

Pope St Damasus I dedicated his life to establishing and strengthening the Church after the great persecutions, and took much care over the restoration of the Roman catacombs and the proper burial of the martyrs there, including Marcellinus and Peter.
  As a boy, Damasus had heard the story of these martyrs from their executioner. Marcellinus was a priest, Peter was not. They were beheaded during the emperor Diocletian’s persecution, and buried on the Via Labicana outside Rome.
  After the persecutions, a basilica was built over the site of their tomb.

Other saints: Saints Pothinus and Blandina (- 177)

France
All that is known of these martyrs comes from a celebrated letter from the church of Lyon to the church in Asia and reproduced by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Ecclesiastical History.
  Pothinus was the first bishop of Lyon, and thus the first Bishop in Gaul, and was arrested in 177 during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, together with Blandina and forty-five other Christians. Pothinus is known to have been very old: the letter says 90 years old.
  Many of the martyrs died in prison or were beheaded, as befitted Roman citizens, but six of them were sentenced to be thrown to the wild beasts in the arena, among them Blandina, a slave.
  The beasts did not touch Blandina, so she was beaten, then burned, then tossed on the horns of a bull, and finally, after having witnessed the martyrdom of her companions (calmly except in the case of her friend Ponticus, whose faith and perseverance she had doubted) was strangled by the public executioner.
  Pothinus was succeeded as bishop by St Irenaeus, one of the great Fathers of the early Church.

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

Second Reading: Saint Theophilus of Antioch (- c.184)

He was born a pagan, somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates, and was led to Christianity by studying the Scriptures and especially the prophets. He became Bishop of Antioch in about 169. The Apology to Autolycus is his sole surviving work. In it he explains and defends Christianity to a pagan friend, drawing most of his evidence and arguments from the Old Testament.

Liturgical colour: violet

Violet is a dark colour, ‘the gloomy cast of the mortified, denoting affliction and melancholy’. Liturgically, it is the colour of Advent and Lent, the seasons of penance and preparation.
Mid-morning reading (Terce)Ezekiel 18:30-32 ©
Repent, renounce all your sins, avoid all occasions of sin! Shake off all the sins you have committed against me, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why are you so anxious to die, House of Israel? I take no pleasure in the death of anyone – it is the Lord who speaks. Repent and live!
Noon reading (Sext)Zechariah 1:3-4 ©
Return to me, says the Lord of Hosts, and I will return to you. Do not be like your ancestors, to whom the prophets in the past cried ‘Turn back from your evil ways and evil deeds’ but they would not listen.
Afternoon reading (None)Daniel 4:24 ©
By virtuous actions break with your sins, break with your crimes by showing mercy to the poor, and so live long and peacefully.

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Scripture readings taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.
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