ST JULIAN, ARCHBISHOP OF TOLEDO - 8 MARCH

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN MARCH

Saints celebrated on the 8th of March

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 JULIAN, ARCHBISHOP OF TOLEDO 

Saint Julian of Toledo presided in the fourteenth and fifteenth councils of Toledo. King Wemba falling sick, received penance and the monastic habit from his hands, and recovering, lived afterwards a monk. 

HIS BOOKS

St Julian has left us a History of the Wars of King Wamba, a book against the Jews, and three books on Prognostics, or on death, and the state of souls after death. 

"LOVE OUGHT TO EXTINGUISH IN US THE FEAR OF DEATH"

He teaches that love, and a desire of being united to God, ought to extinguish in us the natural fear of death: that the saints in heaven pray for us, earnestly desire our happiness, and know our actions either in God whom they behold, and in whom they discover all truth which it concerns them to know; or by the angels, the messengers of God on earth: but that the damned do not ordinarily know what passes on earth, because they neither see God, nor converse with our angels. He says that prayers for the dead are thanksgivings for the good, a propitiation for the souls in purgatory, but no relief to the damned. He was raised to the see of Toledo, in 680, and died in 690. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)