ST ANTONY CAULEAS, PATRIARCH OF CONSTANTINOPLE - 12 FEBRUARY

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN FEBRUARY

 Saints celebrated on the 12th of February

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 ANTONY CAULEAS, PATRIARCH OF CONSTANTINOPLE 

Saint Antony Cauleas [Anthony Kauleas] was by extraction of a noble Phrygian family, but born at a country seat near Constantinople, where his parents lived retired for fear of the persecution and infection of the Iconoclasts. 

FROM TWELVE YEARS OF AGE HE SERVED GOD WITH GREAT FERVOUR

From twelve years of age he served God with great fervour, in a monastery of the city, which some moderns pretend to have been that of Studius. In process of time he was chosen abbot, and, upon the death of Stephen, brother to the emperor Leo VI., surnamed the wise, or the Philosopher, patriarch of Constantinople in 893. 

His predecessor had succeeded Photius in 886, (whom this emperor expelled,) and laboured strenuously to extinguish the schism he had formed, and restore the peace of the church over all the East.

HE LABOURED TO RESTORE PEACE OF THE CHURCH

St Antony, completed this great work, and in a council in which he presided at Constantinople, condemned or reformed all that had been done by Photius, during his last usurpation of that see, after the death of St Ignatius. 

THE ACTS OF THE COUNCIL ARE LOST

The acts of this important council are entirely lost, perhaps through the malice of those Greeks who renewed this unhappy schism. 

HIS HAPPY DEATH

A perfect spirit of mortification, penance, and prayer, sanctified this great pastor, both in his private and public life. He died in the year 896, of his age sixty-seven, on February 12, on which day his name is inserted in the Greek Menaea, and in the Roman Martyrology. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)