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Friday of the 7th week of Eastertide 
 or Saints Pontian, Pope, and Hippolytus, Priest, Martyrs 

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

Christ the Lord has promised us the Holy Spirit: come, let us adore him, alleluia.

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

Saints Pontian and Hippolytus ( - 235)

Hippolytus was a priest and a learned man, the most important writer of the Church at Rome in the early third century. He strongly attacked the popes of the time, and was set up as a rival Pope to St Callistus. Some time later, in Maximin’s persecution, he was sent to labour in the quarries of Sardinia. There he met the then Pope, Pontian, and was reconciled with him.
  Pontian was made Pope in 231, and was sent to the quarries in 235, where he resigned the papacy and died.
  Pontian’s successor, Fabian, had both bodies brought back to Rome for burial, and Pontian and Hippolytus were already being venerated by the Roman Church by the start of the fourth century.
  See also the Catholic Encyclopaedia articles on Pontian and Hippolytus.

Other saints: Saint Fachtna or Fachanan of Ross

Ireland
He is patron saint of the diocese of Ross, of which he was probably the first bishop. He established the monastic school of Ross, at what is now Rosscarbery, in county Cork, one of the most famous schools of Ireland, which flourished for three hundred years.

Other saints: Blessed William Freeman (-1595)

Birmingham
William Freeman was born in Yorkshire and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1586 he witnessed the execution of a Catholic priest in London, and this made such an impression on him that he was reconciled to the Church and left England to study for the priesthood. He was ordained at Rheims in France in 1589. For six years he worked in secret as a priest in Worcestershire and Warwickshire. He was arrested at Alvechurch, condemned to death for being a priest and hanged, drawn and quartered at Warwick on 13 August 1595. At the gallows he said: “I came hither to die for my faith, the true ancient and Catholic faith”. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929.
Birmingham Ordo

Today's Gospel: "When you were young you walked where you liked"

“When you were young
you walked where you liked;
but when you grow old
you will stretch out your hands,
and somebody else will take you
where you would rather not go” (John 21:18)
Christ’s prophecy in today’s Gospel might seem to be speaking merely of Peter’s martyrdom, but it has an additional message for us today.
  In the bad old days people died young and they died, on the whole, quickly. Practically always, they died among the people they had lived with. In today’s kind world such things are receding into the past. Now we are deprived, one by one, of our faculties and all the achievements that made us adult and made us human. We are taken into hospitals or put into homes and imprisoned there by our weakness. If we are unlucky, we are subjected to systematic humiliation and daily petty cruelty from those who ought to be caring for us. If we are lucky, the kindness we receive is still a reminder that we are not the proud, independent beings we once were.
  Let us pray for the weak and old and helpless. Let us pray for their carers (ourselves included), that they may lay their frustrations before Jesus and, by his grace, not take them out on those they should be caring for. Let us pray to St Peter that God may allow us to embrace death, like him, before our endurance fails.

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

Second Reading: St Hilary of Poitiers (- 367)

Hilary was born at the beginning of the fourth century. He was elected Bishop of Poitiers in 350. He fought strongly against Arianism and was exiled by the Emperor Constantius. His works are full of wisdom and learning, directed to the strengthening of the Catholic faith and the right interpretation of Scripture. He died in 367. He was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius IX in 1851.

Liturgical colour: white

White is the colour of heaven. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate feasts of the Lord; Christmas and Easter, the great seasons of the Lord; and the saints. Not that you will always see white in church, because if something more splendid, such as gold, is available, that can and should be used instead. We are, after all, celebrating.
  In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.

Mid-morning reading (Terce)Acts 2:32,36 ©
God raised this man Jesus to life, and all of us are witnesses to that. For this reason the whole House of Israel can be certain that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ.

Noon reading (Sext)Galatians 3:27-28 ©
All baptised in Christ, you have all clothed yourselves in Christ, and there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Afternoon reading (None)1 Corinthians 5:7-8 ©
Get rid of all the old yeast, and make yourselves into a completely new batch of bread, unleavened as you are meant to be. Christ, our passover, has been sacrificed; let us celebrate the feast, then, by getting rid of all the old yeast of evil and wickedness, having only the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

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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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