ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN NOVEMBER
Saints celebrated on the 1st of November
Prayer to the Angels and the Saints
Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.
In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.
Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.
Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.
ST MARCELLUS, BISHOP OF PARIS, CONFESSOR
[St Marcel] was born at Paris in the fourth age, of parents not conspicuous for any rank in the world, but on whom his virtue reflected the greatest honour. Purity of heart, modesty, meekness, mortification, and charity were the ingredients of his character in his youth; and he gave himself entirely to the discipline of virtue and prayer, so as to seem, whilst he lived in the flesh, disengaged both from the world and the flesh, says the author of his life.
DISENGAGED FROM THE WORLD AND THE FLESH
The uncommon gravity of his manners, and his progress in sacred learning so strongly recommended him to Prudentius, Bishop of Paris, that when he was yet young this prelate ordained him reader of that church.
From this time the saint is said to have given frequent proofs of a wonderful gift of miracles. He was afterwards promoted to the dignity of priesthood, and upon the decease of Prudentius was unanimously chosen Bishop of Paris.
BISHOP OF PARIS
As he undertook this charge by compulsion and with trembling, so a just apprehension of his obligations made him always humble, watchful, and indefatigable in all his functions.
It is related that amongst other miracles he freed the country from a great serpent which inhabited the sepulchre of an adulteress. But the circumstances of this action depend upon the authority of one who wrote near two hundred years after the time, and who, being a foreigner, took them upon trust, and probably upon popular reports.
HIS FEAST DAY
The saint died in the beginning of the fifth century, on November 1, on which day he is named in the Roman Martyrology, though in the Gallican his feast is deferred to the 3rd.
His body was buried about a quarter of a league from Paris in a village which is now joined to the town, and called the suburb of St Marceau. His relics have been long since kept in the cathedral.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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