Saints celebrated on the 5th of June
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 DOROTHEUS THE THEBAN, ABBOT
Saint Dorotheus was surnamed the Theban, because a native of Thebes in Egypt. He retired first into a monastery, but after having learned for some time the exercises of an ascetic life under the most experienced masters, he shut himself up in a cavern in a wilderness nine miles from Alexandria, on the road to Nitria.
IN THE WILDERNESS
Here he lived in most austere abstinence and labour. During the greater part of the day, even in the most scorching heat of the sun, he picked up and carried stones, and built cells for other hermits: at night he made cords and baskets of palm-tree leaves, by which he earned six ounces of bread a day, with a handful of herbs, which was his whole subsistence. His watchings were incredible; nor would he allow himself any indulgence in his old age.
When his disciples entreated him to afford a little more rest to his enfeebled body, his answer was: “This enemy would destroy me; therefore I am resolved to be beforehand with it, and keep it in subjection.” It happened that his disciple, Palladius, spying an aspic in the well, durst not drink of the water; but the holy abbot, making the sign of the cross upon the cup, drank, and said: “In the presence of the cross of Christ, the devil loseth his power.” This Palladius, upon his coming into the wilderness, chose St Dorotheus, who had then lived an anchoret in the same austere manner sixty years, for his first master. The saint died towards the end of the fourth century, and is honoured in the Greek Meneae.
OTHER SAINTS CALLED DOROTHEUS
Palladius gives us the foregoing account of his life in the second chapter of the Lausiac history; and Sozomen, l. 6, c. 29. He mentions another Dorotheus, who also lived in the fourth age, and was the spiritual director of a monastery of three hundred nuns. Ibid. c. 36. And a third, an eminent anchoret at the same time near Antinois, c. 97. Another Dorotheus, surnamed the Archimandrite, whom many have confounded with the Theban, flourished two hundred years later near Gaza, was author of twenty-four Ascetic Doctrines, and in his monastery lived St Dositheus.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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