He is famous not only for the beauty of expression of his homilies but also for his hymns, which have spread far beyond his native Syriac church and are in use in East and West alike.

  Brazil at this time was in a very bad way spiritually. On the one hand, there were the Indians to be evangelized and led away from pagan practices including cannibalism (to which they were much attached). On the other hand, both the European settlers and many of the priests, finding themselves in a land where there was no real authority, lived scandalous lives, practising both slavery and concubinage. When the Jesuits arrived in Brazil in 1549 they worked hard to regularize the situation.

  Brother Anchieta became the assistant and interpreter of the Jesuit superior Father Nóbrega. They set up a mission which later grew into the city of São Paulo, and Anchieta made the school there his headquarters. He learned the local Tupi language and wrote the first ever grammar of it; he wrote dramas to teach the faith to the illiterate and the uneducated; he gave medical assistance to the Indians and taught them skills such as agriculture, carpentry, and the use of stone and metal. With Nóbrega he gave himself up as a hostage in 1563 so that a peace settlement could be reached between two warring tribes, and he narrowly escaped martyrdom on more than one occasion.

  He was ordained a priest in 1566 and was the Jesuit Provincial in Brazil from 1577 to 1587. He died on 9 June 1597, exhausted by his labours.

  He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980 and recognized as a saint by Pope Francis on April 2014.

  See also the excellent article by Joseph F.X. Sladky on the Crisis Magazine website.

  When the Persians conquered Anatolia, Maximus was forced to flee to a monastery near Carthage. It was there that he came under the tutelage of Saint Sophronius, and began studying in detail with him the Christological writings of Gregory of Nazianzus and Dionysius the Areopagite. He applied rigorous Aristotelian logic to these writings to make their doctrine clearer, and harder to misunderstand.

  The perennial argument in the East over the nature of Christ – whether true God and true man, or just a divinely commanded man-shaped puppet – flared up yet again, and this time both the Emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople were on the latter side. Maximus taking the side of orthodoxy, he was arrested in Rome in 653, together with Pope Martin I. The Pope was condemned without a trial and died before he could be sent to Constantinople. Maximus was taken there to be tried as a heretic in 658 and was sentenced to four years’ exile. In 662 he was brought back and tried again, and this time his tongue was cut out so that he could no longer speak rebellion and his right hand cut off so that he could no longer write letters. He was exiled to a distant region of the empire, where he died on 13 August of the same year.

  The passages from St Maximus which adorn the Office of Readings have nothing of these controversies in them, but are chosen to reflect for us the glory of the light of the events of our redemption.

  Pray for those who contribute to it.