25 January 2025 (MIA)

Macedonian Orthodox Church Calendar

St. Tatiana Martyr

St. Tatiana came from an eminent family and was educated in the Christian faith. When she reached adulthood, she became indifferent to riches and earthly blessings and came to love the spiritual way of life. She renounced wedded life and was made a deaconess of the Roman Church for her virtuosity. During the reign of Alexander Severus (222-235), around the year 225, she took on a martyr’s suffering for professing her love of Jesus Christ under the Roman city mayor Ulypian. According to the ancient narrative, St. Tatiana was thrown into the arena at the Coliseum after much torture, to be ravaged by a savage lion for the amusement of the spectators. Instead the lion began to be caressed by her. St. Tatiana was then subjected to new tortures, and together with her father was beheaded with a sword.

Catholic Calendar

The Conversion of St. Paul

St. Paul, being born at Tarsus, was by privilege a Roman citizen, to which quality a great distinction and several exemptions were granted by the laws of the empire. His parents sent him young to Jerusalem, where he was educated and instructed in the strictest observance of the law of Moses. He embraced the sect of the Pharisees, which was of all others the most severe. Paul became thereby a blasphemer, a persecutor, and the most outrageous enemy of Christ, particularly of those Jews influenced by St. Stephen. At age of 36, Paul traveled to Damascus, and met Christ, who said “Paul, Paul, why cost thou persecute me?” Paul felt from his horse in astonishment and, though his eyes were open, he saw nothing. Providence sent this corporal blindness to be an emblem of the spiritual blindness in which he had lived. He was lodged in the house of a Jew named Judas, where he remained three days blind and than miraculously his eyesight was recovered. He started to preach that only Christ could bring salvation. He died for Christ at 67 during his journey to Rome.