Saints celebrated on the 26th of May
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 ELEUTHERIUS, POPE AND MARTYR
Saint Eleutherius was by birth a Grecian, and deacon of the church of Rome under Pope Anicetus. He succeeded St Soter in the pontificate in 176, and governed the church whilst it was beaten with violent storms.
THE MONTANISTS
Montanus, an ambitious vain man of Moesia on the confines of Phrygia, sought to raise himself among men by pretending that the Holy Ghost spoke by his mouth, and published forged revelations. His followers afterwards advanced that he was himself the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete Spirit sent by Christ according to his promises to perfect his law. They seem at first only to have been schismatics and enthusiasts; but soon after added heresy and blasphemy, calling Montanus the Holy Ghost in the same manner that Christ is God the Son. They affected an excessive rigour, had many fasts, kept three Lents in the year, refused the communion and absolution to persons who had fallen into any sin of impurity, condemned second marriages as adulteries, and taught that it is unlawful to flee from persecution. Priscilla and Maximilla, two women of the town of Pepuza in Phrygia, vaunted their pretended prophecies, and were the oracles of their deluded votaries.
BAITS TO DESTROY SOULS
The devil uses all sorts of baits to destroy souls. If many perish by those of pleasure, others fall by pride, which is gratified by a love of singularity, and by an affected austerity. Some who braved the racks and gridirons of the persecutors, and despised the allurements of pleasure, had the misfortune to become the dupes of this wretched enthusiast, and martyrs of the devil. False prophets wear every face except that of a sincere and docile humility, though their austerity towards themselves usually ends in a short time in some shameful libertinism, when vanity, the main-spring of their passions, is either cloyed or finds nothing to gratify it.
NOT UNLIKE THE FALSE RIGOURS OF OUR TIMES
In this we see the false rigorists of our times resemble those of former ages. Pharisee-like they please themselves, and gratify their own pride in an affected severity; by it they also seek to establish themselves in the opinion of others. But humility and obedience are a touchstone which discovers their spirit. Montanus succeeded to the destruction of many souls who by pride or the like passions sought the snare; among others the great Tertullian fell, and not only regarded Montanus as the paraclete, but so much lost his faith and his reason as to honour the ground on which his two pretended prophetesses had trod; and to publish in his writings their illusions and dreams concerning the colour of a human soul, and the like absurdities and inconsistencies as oracles of the eternal truth.
The Montanists of Asia, otherwise called Cataphyrges and Pepuzenians, sought in the beginning the communion and approbation of the bishop of Rome, to whom they sent letters and presents. A certain pope was prevailed upon, by the good accounts he had received of their severe morals and virtue, to send them letters of communion. But Praxeas, one who had confessed his faith before the persecutors, arriving at Rome, gave him such informations concerning the Pepuzenians and their prophecies, showing him that he could not admit them without condemning the judgment of his predecessors, that he revoked the letters of peace which he had determined to send, and refused their presents. This is the account which Tertullian, himself a Montanist, gives of the matter.
ELEUTHERIUS HAD REJECTED THE PRETENDED PROPHETS
Dr. Cave and some others think this pope was Eleutherius, and that he approved the very doctrine of the Montanists; which is certainly a mistake. For the pope received from Praxeas only information as to matters of fact. He was only undeceived by him as to persons and facts, and this before any sentence was given. Nay, it seems that the Montanists had not then openly broached their errors in faith, which they for some time artfully disguised. It seems also, from the circumstances of the time, that the pope whom Praxeas undeceived was Victor the successor of Eleutherius, and that Eleutherius himself had before rejected the pretended prophets.
MARCUS AURELIUS' PERSECUTION
This good pope had the affliction to see great havoc made in his flock by the persecution, especially at Lyons and Vienne, under Marcus Aurelius. But he had, on the other side, the comfort to find the losses richly repaired by the acquisition of new countries to the faith. The light of the gospel had, in the very times of the apostles, crossed the sea into the island of Great Britain; but seems to have been almost choked by the tares of the reigning superstitions, or oppressed by the tumults of wars in the reduction of that valiant people under the Roman yoke, till God, who chose poor fishermen to convert the world, here taught a king to esteem it a greater happiness to become an apostle, and to extend his faith in this remote corner of the world, than to wear a crown.
THE BRITISH MISSION
This was Lucius, a petty king who reigned in a part of the island. His Roman name shows that he was one of those kings whom the Romans honoured with that dignity in remote conquered countries to be their instruments in holding them in subjection. Lucius sent a solemn embassy to Rome to beg some zealous clergymen of Pope Eleutherius who might instruct his subjects and celebrate and administer to them the divine mysteries.
DWYWAN AND FAGAN
Our saint received the message with joy, and sent apostolical men who preached Christ in this island with such fruit, that the faith in a very short time passed out of the provinces which obeyed the Romans into those northern parts which were inaccessible to their eagles, as Tertullian wrote soon after. Fugatius and Damianus are said to have been the two principal of these Roman missionaries: the old Welsh Chronicle, quoted by Usher, calls them Dwywan and Fagan.
They died in or near the diocese of Landaff; and Harpsfield says, there stood in Wales a church dedicated to God under their invocation. Stow in his Annals says that in Somersetshire there remaineth a parish church bearing the name of St Deruvion. From this time the faith became very flourishing in Britain, as is mentioned by Origen.
HE GOVERNED THE CHURCH FIFTEEN YEARS
Florinus, who taught that God was the author of evil, and Blastus, who pretended that the custom of celebrating Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon, which was tolerated in the Orientals, ought to be followed at Rome, were condemned by St Eleutherius, who governed the church fifteen years, and died soon after the Emperor Commodus in 192. He was buried on the Salarian road; but his remains have been translated to the Vatican church.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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