ST AEDISIUS, MARTYR - 8 APRIL

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN APRIL

Saints celebrated on the 8th of April

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 AEDISIUS, MARTYR 

Saint Aedisius (Ædisius] was brother to St Apian, who received his crown at Caesarea, on April 2, and a native of Lycia, had been a professed philosopher, and continued to wear the cloak after his conversion to the faith. 

HE WENT TO EGYPT

He was long a scholar of St Pamphilus at Caesarea. In the persecution of Galerius Maximianus he often confessed his faith before magistrates, had sanctified several dungeons, and been condemned to the mines in Palestine. Being released from thence, he went into Egypt, but there found the persecution more violent than in Palestine itself, under Hierocles, the most barbarous prefect of Egypt, for Maximinus Daia, Caesar. 

HE REPROACHED THE JUDGE

This governor had also employed his pen against the faith, presuming to put the sorceries of Apollonius of Tyana upon a level with the miracles of Christ, whom Eusebius confuted by a book entitled, Against Hierocles. Aedesius being at Alexandria, and observing how outrageously the judge proceeded against the Christians, by tormenting grave men, and delivering women of singular piety, and even virgins, to the infamous purchasers of slaves, he boldly presented himself before this savage monster, rather than a man, and reproached him with his crying inhumanity, especially in exposing holy virgins to lewdness. 

THE CROWN OF MARTYRDOM

He endured courageously the scourge, and the greatest torments which the rage of such a tyrant was capable of inventing, and was at length cast into the sea, in 306, after the same manner as his brother, who obtained his crown a little while before, as the Chaldaic acts expressly inform us.

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)