24 March 2025 (MIA)

Macedonian Orthodox Church Calendar

St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem

He was born in Damascus of eminent parents. Having acquired worldly wisdom, he began to acquire pure, spiritual wisdom. In the monastery of St. Theodosius he met the monk John Moschus, whom he took as his teacher. They set out to visit the monasteries and ascetics of Egypt to glean more spiritual wisdom each day. They wrote down all that they discovered and later published it in two books entitled The Spiritual Meadow. They went to Rome, where Moschus died, leaving Sophronius with the pledge to take him either to Sinai or to the Monastery of St Theodosius. Sophronius fulfilled the desire of his teacher and took his body to the monastery, after which he was delayed in Jerusalem, which by then had been freed from the Persians. He witnessed the return of the Precious Cross from Persia, which the Emperor Heraclius carried into the Holy City on his back. The old Patriarch, Zacharias, who also returned from slavery, did not live long and, when he died, was followed first by Modestus, who died in 634, and then by blessed Sophronius. He governed the Church with outstanding wisdom and zeal for four years, standing in defense of Orthodoxy against the Monothelite heresy, which he condemned at his Council in Jerusalem before it was condemned at the 6th Ecumenical Council. He wrote the life of St. Mary of Egypt, compiled the rite of the Great Blessing of Water and introduced various new hymns and songs into different services. When the Arabian Caliph Omar captured Jerusalem, Sophronius begged him to spare the Christians. When Omar began to plunder and ill-treat the Christians in Jerusalem, Sophronius, with many lamentations, begged God to take him from among the living that he should not see the desecration of the holy places. And God took him to Himself in 644.

Catholic Calendar

St. Catherine of Sweden

Saint Catherine of Sweden Virgin, c. 1330-1381. This saint is the daughter of an even more famous Woman-Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden. Catherine, who was born about 1330, was a married woman who, with her husband, took a vow of continence. She went to Rome in 1348, where her mother had gone after the death of Catherine’s father. Catherine’s husband died after she had been in Rome a short time, and for the next twenty-five years the two women used that city as a base for pilgrimages to a variety of places, including Jerusalem. When not on pilgrimage, they spent their days in prayer and meditation and in working with the poor and instructing them in religion. This seemingly quiet life was not without perils and adventures. Dissolute young lords repeatedly sought to seduce the Swedish princess, but God’s providence unfailingly thwarted their efforts. After the trip to Jerusalem, Bridget died, and Catherine took her mother’s body back to Sweden, burying it at Vadstena, in the convent of the Order of the Holy Savior, which Bridget had founded. Catherine became superior of the order and died on March 24, 1381, mourned like her mother by the whole of Sweden.