Tuesday 7 January 2025    (other days)
Saint Cnut the Duke, Martyr 
 on Tuesday after Epiphany Sunday

Using calendar: Denmark. You can pick a diocese or region.

The Lord is the king of martyrs: come, let us adore him.

Year: C(I). Psalm week: 2. Liturgical Colour: Red.

Other saints: St André Bessette (1845 - 1937)

Canada: 7 Jan
United States: 6 Jan
He was born in Québec and joined the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1872: the parish priest sent this functionally illiterate, frail young man to the Congregation with the words “I am sending you a saint”.
  He had great confidence in Saint Joseph and recommended prayer to him to all who were sick. So many were cured that Brother André himself was acclaimed as a miracle-worker, and when he died on 6 January 1937, a million people filed past his coffin. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on 17 October 2010. See the article in Wikipedia.

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

Second Reading: Saint 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; Hippolytus must have died at about the same time).
  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. Hippolytus was the most important theologian and the most prolific religious writer of the Roman Church in the pre-Constantinian era. Unfortunately most of his works have been lost or are known only through scattered fragments, while much has survived only in old translations into Oriental and Slavonic languages, tangled up with the writings of other authors. The fact that Hippolytus wrote in Greek means that later, when that language was no longer understood in Rome, the Romans lost interest in his writings, while in the East they were read long after, and made the author famous.
  The “Discourse on the Theophany” [or Epiphany] was probably wrongly attributed to Hippolytus, which makes it hard to get a sense of him as a preacher; but it is of a similar period and outlook.

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.


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