ST NICETAS, ABBOT - 3 APRIL

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN APRIL

Saints celebrated on the 3rd 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 NICETAS, ABBOT - 3 APRIL

Saint Nicetas was a native of Bithynia, and from his infancy was brought up in austere monasteries by the care of his pious father Philaretus, who, after the loss of his wife, had himself embraced a monastic state. 

HIS ASCETICISM

Nicetas emulated the most perfect examples of virtue: his mind was wholly occupied in prayer and pious reading, and his body was so extenuated by the severity of his fasts and watching, that it nearly resembled a walking skeleton. 

But his soul grew the more vigorous and active in proportion as it was more disengaged from the flesh, and by contemplation approached nearer to the angels. St Nicephorus appointed him his coadjutor, and afterwards recommended him to be his successor in the abbey of Medicion, which he had founded on mount Olympus, under the rule of the Acaemetes. In this calm and amiable retreat the saint and a hundred holy monks under his direction, led the lives of terrestrial angels, when the devil found means to disturb their tranquillity, though in the end his attempts only served to furnish their virtue with more distinguished occasions of triumph. 

HIS BANISHMENTS

In 813, the emperor Leo the Armenian renewed the war against holy images, and, in 814, banished the patriarch St Nicephorus, and intruded into his see one Theodosius, an impious officer of the court. The zeal of Nicetas for the Catholic faith was recompensed by two banishments, a rigid imprisonment, and other severe sufferings. 

Theodosius, having pronounced anathema against all who did not honour the image of Jesus Christ, our abbot, regarding him as orthodox, consented, with many other confessors, to receive the communion from his hands; but was immediately stung with remorse, fearing lest he had been drawn into a conformity which some might interpret to the prejudice of the truth. Hereupon he openly protested that he would never abandon the faith of his ancestors, or obey the false patriarch. 

HE WAS CONFINED IN A DARK DUNGEON

He rejected the offers of preferment at court, and chose rather to suffer a cruel banishment into the island of St Glyceria, in the extremities of the Propontis, under the guard of Anthimus, a court eunuch, who confined him in a dark dungeon, the key of which he always kept in his own custody. 

A little food, merely what seemed necessary to preserve him alive, was carelessly thrown in to him through a little window. In this martyrdom he lingered six years, till the death of Leo the Armenian, who was murdered on Christmas-day, in 820. Michael the Stutterer, who then ascended the throne, released the prisoners. St Nicetas chose, out of humility, neither to return to his monastery, nor to live at Constantinople; but, shutting himself up in a small hermitage near that city, prepared himself for death, which he met with joy on April 3, 824. Many miracles rendered his name illustrious on earth. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)