ST HEGESIPPUS - 7 APRIL

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN APRIL

Saints celebrated on the 7th 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 HEGESIPPUS

(An early Father, near the times of the Apostles.) 

Saint Hegesippus was by birth a Jew, and belonged to the church of Jerusalem, but, travelling to Rome, he lived there nearly twenty years from the pontificate of Anicetus to that of Eleutherius, in 177, when he returned into the East, where he died very old, probably at Jerusalem, in the year of Christ 180, according to the chronicle of Alexandria. 

A HISTORY OF THE CHURCH

He wrote in the year 133 a History of the Church, in five books, from the passion of Christ down to his own time, the loss of which work is extremely regretted. In it he gave illustrious proofs of his faith, and showed the apostolical tradition, and that though certain men had disturbed the church by broaching heresies, yet down to his time no episcopal see or particular church had fallen into error, but had in all places preserved inviolably the truths delivered by Christ, as he assures us.  

THE SPIRIT OF THE APOSTLES

This testimony he gave after having personally visited all the principal churches both of the East and West. He was a man replenished with the spirit of the apostles, and a love of Christian humility, which, says Jerome, he expressed by the simplicity of his style. The five books on the destruction of Jerusalem, compiled chiefly from the history of Josephus, are not the work of this father, as some have imagined; but of a younger Hegesippus, who wrote before the destruction of the Western empire, but after Constantine the Great. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)