ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN FEBRUARY
Saints celebrated on the 25th 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 CAESARIUS OF NAZIANZUS, CONFESSOR
Saint Caesarius was a physician, and brother to St Gregory Nazianzen. When the latter repaired to Caesarea, in Palestine, where the sacred studies flourished, Caesarius went to Alexandria, and with incredible success ran through the circle of the sciences, amongst which oratory, philosophy, and especially medicine, fixed his attention. In this last he became the first man of his age.
AN OUTSTANDING DOCTOR
He perfected himself in this profession at Constantinople, but excused himself from settling there, as the city and the emperor Constantius earnestly requested him to do.
He was afterwards recalled thither, singularly honoured by Julian the Apostate, nominated his first physician, and excepted in several edicts which that prince published against the Christians.
ST JULIAN THE APOSTATE'S FIRST PHYSICIAN
He resisted strenuously the insinuating discourses and artifices with which that prince endeavoured to seduce him, and was prevailed upon by the remonstrances of his father and brother to resign his places at court, and prefer a retreat, whatever solicitations Julian could use to detain him.
Jovian honourably restored him, and Valens, moreover, created him treasurer of his own private purse, and of Bithynia.
HE RENOUNCED THE WORLD
A narrow escape in an earthquake at Nice, in Bithynia, in 368, worked so powerfully on his mind, that he renounced the world, and died shortly after, in the beginning of the year 369, leaving the poor his heirs. The Greeks honour his memory on March 9, as Nicephorus testifies, and as appears from the Menaea in the Roman Martyrology, he is named on February 25.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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