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Christ the Lord was tempted and suffered for us. Come, let us adore him.
Or: O that today you would listen to his voice: harden not your hearts.

Year: C(I). Psalm week: 3. Liturgical Colour: Violet.

Other saints: Saint Macartan (- 506)

Ireland

He was a convert from paganism and a companion of St Patrick, who made him bishop of Clogher in 454. He is the patron saint of the diocese.

Other saints: St Oscar Romero (1917-1980)

Trinidad & Tobago

Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez was born in El Salvador in 1917. He originally trained as a carpenter but early decided to become a priest. He was ordained in Rome in 1942. Returning to his home country, he became a parish priest, then rector of a seminary, and finally, in 1977, as Archbishop of San Salvador, the primate of the country.

The country was in an unstable state, with enormous divisions in society and terror on every side, both from insurgent movements and from the government: each side seeming to have no option other than outdoing the other in violence. More and more people were being terrorised or tortured or murdered. Romero responded to the situation. His weekly homilies listed disappearances, tortures and killings across the country. Broadcast on national radio, they had a larger audience than any other programme.

Romero’s definitive broadcast was on 23 March 1980, when he called on the army, whose members were sworn to be servants of the people and were also, most of them, baptised Christians, to cease from repression and disobey any orders that were contrary to the law of God. His assassination the next day underlined his message in blood. He was beatified in San Salvador in 2015 canonised by Pope Francis in Rome in 2018.

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: St Basil the Great (330 - 379)

St Basil the Great, or Basil of Caesarea, was one of the three men known as the Cappadocian Fathers. The others are his younger brother, St Gregory of Nyssa, and St Gregory Nazianzen. They were active after the Council of Nicaea, working to formulate Trinitarian doctrine precisely and, in particular, to pin down the meaning and role of the least humanly comprehensible member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Basil was the leader and organizer; Gregory of Nazianzus was the thinker, the orator, the poet, pushed into administrative and episcopal roles by circumstances and by Basil; and Gregory of Nyssa, Basil’s brother, although not a great stylist, was the most gifted of the three as a philosopher and theologian. Together, the Cappadocian Fathers hammered out the doctrine of the Trinity like blacksmiths forging a piece of metal by hammer-blows into its perfect, destined shape. They were champions – and successful champions – of orthodoxy against Arianism, a battle that had to be conducted as much on the worldly and political plane as on the philosophical and theological one.

In addition to his role in doctrinal development, Basil is also the father of Eastern monasticism. He moderated the heroic ascetic practices that were characteristic of earlier monastic life, to the point where they could be part of a life in which work, prayer and ascetic practices could be in harmonious balance. Knowledge of Basil’s work and Rule spread to the West and was an influence on the founding work of St Benedict.

The works of Basil that appear in the Second Readings are mostly from his works on the Holy Spirit, but there are also extracts from his monastic Rule.

Liturgical colour: violet

Violet is a dark colour, ‘the gloomy cast of the mortified, denoting affliction and melancholy’. Liturgically, it is the colour of Advent and Lent, the seasons of penance and preparation.