ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN JANUARY
Saints celebrated on the 15th of January
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 JOHN CALYBITE, RECLUSE
Saint John Calybite was the son of Eutropius, a rich nobleman in Constantinople. He secretly left home to become a monk among the Acaemetes.
After six years he returned disguised in the rags of a beggar, and subsisted by the charity of his parents, as a stranger, in a little hut near their house; hence he was called the Calybite.
WONDERFUL PATIENCE, MEEKNESS, HUMILITY, MORTIFICATION, AND PRAYER
He sanctified his soul by wonderful patience, meekness, humility, mortification, and prayer. He discovered himself to his mother, in his agony, in the year 450, and, according to his request, was buried under his hut; but his parents built over his tomb a stately church, as the author of his life mentions.
Cedrenus, who says it stood in the western quarter of the city, calls it the church of poor John; Zonaras, the church of St John Calybite.
HIS RELICS
An old church, standing near the bridge of the isle of the Tiber in Rome, which bore his name, according to an inscription there, was built by Pope Formosus, (who died in 896,) together with an hospital. From which circumstance Du Cange infers, that the body of our saint, which is preserved in this church, was conveyed from Constantinople to Rome, before the broaching of the Iconoclast heresy under Leo the Isarian, in 706: but his head remained at Constantinople till after that city fell into the hands of the Latins, in 1204; soon after which it was brought to Besanzon in Burgundy, where it is kept in St Stephen’s church, with a Greek inscription round the case.
THE CHURCH OF ST JOHN OF CALYBITE AT ROME
The church which bears the name of Saint John Calybite, at Rome, with the hospital, is now in the hands of religious men of the order of St John of God.
HE FLOURISHED IN THE FIFTH CENTURY
Bollandius' account suggests that St John Calybite flourished under Theodosius the Younger, who died in 450: Nicephorus says, under Leo, who was proclaimed emperor in 457; so that both statements may be true.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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