Saint Notburga

 

 

   Saint Notburga (c. 1265 – September 16, 1313), also known as Notburga of Rattenberg or  Notburga of Eben, was an Austrian saint from modern Tyrol. She is the patron saint of servants and peasants.
   Notburga was a cook in the household of Count Henry of Rattenberg, and used to give food to the poor. But Ottilia, her mistress, ordered her to feed any leftover food to the pigs. To continue her mission, Notburga began to save some of her own food, especially on Fridays, and brought it to the poor.
   According to her legend, one day her master met her and commanded her to show him what she was carrying. She obeyed but instead of the food he saw only shavings, and instead of wine, vinegar.   As a result of Notburga's actions, Ottilia dismissed her, but soon fell dangerously ill. Notburga remained to nurse her and prepared her for death.
   Next, Notburga worked for a peasant, on the condition that she be permitted to go to church evenings before Sundays and festivals. One evening her master urged her to continue working in the field. Throwing her sickle into the air she supposedly said: "Let my sickle be judge between me and you," and the sickle remained suspended in the air.
In the meantime, Count Henry had suffered difficulties, which he ascribed to his dismissal of Notburga, so he rehired her. Shortly before her death she is said to have told her master to place her corpse on a wagon drawn by two oxen and to bury her wherever the oxen stood still. The oxen drew the wagon to the chapel of St. Rupert near Eben, where she was buried.

Ioann (John) of Novgorod

   The son of a priest, Ilya was himself priest of the Church of St. Blaise south of the Novgorod Kremlin. The church was rebuilt in 1407, destroyed during the Second World War, and has been rebuilt again; it still stands today. It is believed that Ilya was his first monastic name, thus his baptismal name is not known.

  

   Ilya was appointed bishop of Novgorod by Metropolitan Ioann of Kiev in 1165. He was the first to hold the title of archbishop in Novgorod after the office was elevated to the archiepiscopal dignity a few months later. Nifont (1130–1156) held the title as a personal honor.

   Ioann carried out a number of construction projects in Novgorod along with his brother, Gavril (also known as Grigorii), who succeeded him as archbishop (1186–1193).

   He died on September 7, 1186 and is buried in the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom in the west gallery next to the Predtechenskaia Porch. He was originally buried below the floor in the Martirievskii Porch (where his brother is still buried), but his relics were later moved. His relics were desecrated during the Soviet anti-religious campaigns on April 3, 1919. They are now in a new sarcophagus with a new sarcophagial effigy (from the 1990s) covering it.

   Ioann appears in a number of medieval tales (some of them set centuries after his death) as the quintessential archbishop of Novgorod. (He is almost always referred to as Ioann in them). The most famous tale depicts him conquering a devil and forcing it to transform itself into a horse and fly him to Jerusalem and back in a single night. In Jerusalem, he took the measurements of the Holy Sepulchre. This tale was developed to explain how a chapel matching the exact measurements of the Holy Sepulchre was established in the Cathedral. 

Quiricus and Julietta

 Julietta and her three-year (sometimes described as three-month) old Cyricus had fled to Tarsus and were identified as Christians. Them escaped from there town with two female slaves. Julietta was tortured, and her three-year-old son, being held by the governor of Tarsus, scratched the governor's face and was killed by being thrown down by some stairs. Julietta did not weep but celebrated the fact that her son had earned the crown of martyrdom. In anger, the governor then decreed that Julietta’s sides should be ripped apart with hooks, and then she was beheaded. Her body, along with that of Cyricus, was flung outside the city, on the heap of bodies belonging to criminals, but the two maids rescued the corpses of the mother and child and buried them in a nearby field.

Bartholomew the Apostle

   Bartholomew  was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, and is usually identified with Nathanael (alternatively spelled Nathaniel), who appears in the Gospel according to John as being introduced to Christ by Philip, who would also become an Apostle.[Jn 1:43-51] He is also identified as "Nathanael of Cana in Galilee" in John 21:2.

He wasmartyred in Albanopolis in Armenia.  He was crucified, head downward. But he just smiled and prayed to Jesus. After that he was flayed alive. He is said to have converted Polymius, the king of Armenia, to Christianity. 

Charles Lwanga and James Hannington

   Charles was born in the Kingdom of Buganda, the southern part of modern Uganda, and served as a page and later major-domo in the court of King Mwanga II. As part of the king's effort to resist foreign colonization, the king insisted that Christian converts abandon their new faith, and executed many Anglicans and Catholics between 1885 and 1887, many of whom were officials in the royal court or otherwise very close to him, including Lwanga.

   The persecution started in 1885. After a massacre of Anglican missionaries, which included Bishop James Hannington, the leader of the Catholic community, Joseph Mukasa – who was then major-domo of the court, as well as a lay catechist—reproached the king for the killings, against which he had counseled him. Mwanga had Mukasa beheaded and arrested all of his followers. This took place on November 15th. The king then ordered that Lwanga, who was chief page at that time, take up Mukasa's duties. That same day, Lwanga sought baptism as a Catholic by a missionary priest.

   On May 25, 1886, Mwanga ordered a general assembly of the court while they were settled at Munyonyo, where he charged two of the pages, whom he then condemned to death. The following morning, Lwanga secretly baptized those of his charges who were still only catechumens. Later that day, the king called a court assembly in which he interrogated all present to see if any would renounce Christianity. Led by Lwanga, the royal pages declared their fidelity to their religion, upon which the king ordered them bound and condemned them to death, directing that they be marched to the traditional place of execution. Two of the prisoners were executed on the march there.

   When preparations were completed and the day had come for the execution on June 3rd, Lwanga was separated from the others by the Guardian of the Sacred Flame for private execution, in keeping with custom . As he was being burnt, Charles said to the Guardian, "It is as if you are pouring water on me. Please repent and become a Christian like me."

   Twelve Catholic boys and men and nine Anglicans were then burnt alive (another Catholic, Mbaga Tuzinde, was speared to death for refusing to renounce Christianity, and his body was thrown into the furnace to be burned along with those of Lwanga and the others). The ire of the king was particularly inflamed against the Christians was because they refused to accede to demands to participate in sexual acts with him. Charles Lwanga, in particular, had protected the pages from King Mwanga's sexual advances.The executions were also motivated by Mwanga's broader efforts to avoid foreign threats to his power. According to Assa Okoth, Mwanga's overriding preoccupation was for the "integrity of his kingdom," and perceived that men such as Lwanga were working with foreigners in "poisoning the very roots of his kingdom". Not to have taken any action could have led to suggestions that he was a weak sovereign.

   James Hannington was born on 3 September 1847 at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex, England, about eight miles from Brighton, where his father ran a warehouse, and was part of the family that ran Hannington's Department stores. His father, Charles Smith Hannington, had recently acquired the property known as St. George’s, a pleasant mansion with its ample grounds. An adventurous child, at one point he blew off his thumb with black powder. The boy was an eager collector, and his cases and cabinets increased in size and number. In these pursuits he was helped and encouraged by his mother—“the gentlest, sweetest, dearest mother that, ever lived”, as he once called her. Her understanding love was the greatest influence in the early life of the excitable, high-spirited and sometimes wayward boy.

   For James’s early education a tutor had been engaged, but when he was thirteen he was sent to the Temple School at Brighton, where he remained for the next two-and-a-half years. Despite the kindness and sympathy of a discerning headmaster, academic studies did not, at this stage, appeal to him.
A poor scholar, he left school at fifteen to work in his father's Brighton counting house.

   In June 1884, having recovered, he was ordained bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, and in January 1885, at age thirty-seven, Hannington again departed for Africa. His diocese included missions of the CMS at the coast and inland in Buganda. while there Hannington collected a number of shells which were described by E. A. Smith in two papers in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History.

   After arriving at Freretown, near Mombasa, Kenya he determined to pioneer a shorter and healthier highland road to Buganda, using Christian porters and undercutting the Arab slave route to the south. He was oblivious to the political consequences of traversing Busoga, a strategically sensitive area for the Buganda state. The sudden intrusion of German imperialism at the coast made the Bugandan ruler, Kabaka Mwanga, even more suspicious of Hannington's motives. Together with his team, he safely reached a spot near Victoria Nyanza on 21 October, but his arrival had not gone unnoticed, and under the orders of King Mwanga II of Buganda, the missionaries were imprisoned in Busoga by Basoga chiefs.

   After eight days of captivity, by order from King Mwanga II, Hannington's porters were killed, and on 29 October 1885, Hannington himself was speared in both sides. As he died, his alleged last words to the soldiers who killed him were: "Go, tell Mwanga I have purchased the road to Uganda with my blood.

Theodosia of Constantinople

   Theodosia was a nun living at a monastery in Constantinople. On January 19, 729, at the very beginning of the iconoclastic persecutions, theEmperor Leo III the Isaurian ordered that an icon of Christ which stood over the Chalke Gate of the imperial palace be removed. While an officer was executing the order, a group of women gathered to prevent the operation. Among them was Theodosia, who shook the ladder strongly until the officer fell from it. The man died from his injuries, and Theodosia was arrested and brought to the Forum Bovis, where she was executed by having a ram's horn hammered through her neck. 

Eleutheirius

    Born in Rome, Eleutherius's father died when he was a young child and his mother, Anthia, took him to Anicetus, the Bishop of Rome, who taught him in the divine scriptures. Eleutherius is venerated as a bishop of Illyricum; according to tradition, Antia was his mother. According to a source in Greek dating from before the 5th century, Antia was the widow of a consulnamed Eugenius. Her son Eleutherius was ordained a deacon and priestand then consecrated as bishop by a man named Anicetus. This tradition may have originated through confusion with Pope St. Eleutherius, who may have been a deacon of Pope Anicetus (c. 154-164).
   The tradition states that Eleutherius was appointed bishop of Messina and Illyricum at the age of twenty and apparently settled in Valona. He was imprisoned by a comes named Felix; Eleutherius and Antia were taken to Rome to be judged by the Emperor Hadrian. According to this source, Eleutherius and Antia were both condemned to death on December 15.According to tradition, Eleutherius was clubbed to death.