ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN OCTOBER
Saints celebrated on the 30th of October
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 ASTERIUS, BISHOP OF AMASEA
Saint Asterius was born ca. 350 A. D. We learn from the writings of this holy prelate that in his youth he applied himself to the study of eloquence and the law, and pleaded for some time at the bar. But the love of God ceased not to raise an interior voice in his soul which seemed continually to exhort him to devote himself wholly to the spiritual service of his neighbour.
In obedience to this call he renounced his profession and preferments in the world, and entered himself among the clergy.
Upon the death of Eulalius, archbishop of Amasea, he was unanimously placed in that metropolitical see.
Always zealous for the purity of the Catholic faith, he taught its most holy maxims, and laboured assiduously to inspire his flock with its perfect spirit. He appeared in the midst of his people as a vessel filled with that spirit, and communicating the same from the overflowing fullness of his own heart, as St Gregory describes the good pastor.
For it is a vain and foolish presumption and a scandalous profanation for a man to set up for a doctor of penance, patience, humility, and holy charity, who is himself a stranger to those virtues. St Asterius in his sermons recommends alms deeds with an energy which shows charity to the poor to be his favourite virtue. Avarice, luxury, and all other vices he paints in colours which set their deformity in a true light, and inspire men with abhorrence.
He lived to a very advanced age; speaks of the persecution of Julian as an eye-witness, and survived the year 400. For, in his sermon against the calends, which he preached on New Year’s Day, he says that Eutropius was consul the foregoing year, which was in 399.
He loudly exerts his zeal against the riots of that day, derived from paganism, and declaims against the noise and tumultuous wishes of a happy new year from door to door, in which idle employ many lose that time which they ought rather to employ in dedicating to God the first fruits of the year by prayer. He says that the church then kept the feasts of Christ’s birth, resurrection, and epiphany, or of lights; likewise the feasts of martyrs. But asks: "What is the festival which Christians keep on the calends and in riots?" The ancients style St Asterius blessed, and a divine doctor who, as a bright star, diffused his light upon all hearts.
We have extant several sermons of St Asterius, which, though few, are an immortal monument of his masterly eloquence and genius no less than of his piety. His reflections are just and solid, and the expression natural, elegant, and animated; he abounds in lively images and descriptions both of persons and things, which he always beautifies by masterly strokes.
In these he discovers a great strength of imagination, and a commanding genius, and moves the inmost springs of the soul. His homily on Daniel and Susanna is a masterpiece. In that on SS. Peter and Paul he teaches and often repeats the prerogative of jurisdiction which St Peter received over all Christians from the East to the West: and says that Christ made him his vicar, and left him the father, pastor, and master of all those who should embrace the faith. In his panegyric of St Phocas, the martyr at Sinope, he established manifestly the invocation of saints, the honouring of their relics, pilgrimages to pray before them, and miracles wrought by them.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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