Universalis
Saturday 25 February 2023    (other days)
Saturday after Ash Wednesday 

Using calendar: Australia - Adelaide. You can change this.

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: A(I). Psalm week: 4. Liturgical Colour: Violet.

Other saints: St Ethelbert (c.560 - 616)

Hallam, Southwark
Ethelbert, or Aethelberht, was King of Kent from about 580 or 590 until his death. He was the first king in England to convert to Christianity: according to Bede, this happened shortly after St Augustine arrived on his mission to the English. He helped the Church to establish itself by making it a gift of land at Canterbury.

Other saints: Bl. Maria Adeodata Pisani (1806 - 1855)

Malta
She was the daughter of noble Maltese parents, who separated while she was still a small child. She renounced her wealth and position and became a nun at the age of 21 despite her mother’s disapproval. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2001.

Other saints: St Walburga (- 776)

Plymouth
Walburga was the daughter of the saintly Saxon prince Richard of Wessex. At the invitation of St Boniface, she accompanied her brothers SS. Willibald and Winebald to Germany, where she founded monasteries. She died on May 11th 776, as Abbess of Heidenheim, and her body was placed in a rocky niche in Eichstadt. It was said that there began to exude from this place a miraculously therapeutic oil, which drew many pilgrims.
Plymouth Ordo

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

Second Reading: St Irenaeus (130 - 202)

Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, in Asia Minor (now Izmir in Turkey) and emigrated to Lyons, in France, where he eventually became the bishop. It is not known for certain whether he was martyred or died a natural death.
  Whenever we take up a Bible we touch Irenaeus’s work, for he played a decisive role in fixing the canon of the New Testament. It is easy for people nowadays to think of Scripture – and the New Testament in particular – as the basis of the Church, but harder to remember that it was the Church itself that had to agree, early on, about what was scriptural and what was not. Before Irenaeus, there was vague general agreement on what scripture was, but a system based on this kind of common consent was too weak. As dissensions and heresies arose, reference to scripture was the obvious way of trying to settle what the truth really was, but in the absence of an agreed canon of scripture it was all too easy to attack one’s opponent’s arguments by saying that his texts were corrupt or unscriptural; and easy, too, to do a little fine-tuning of texts on one’s own behalf. Irenaeus not only established a canon which is almost identical to our present one, but also gave reasoned arguments for each inclusion and exclusion.
  Irenaeus also wrote a major work, Against the Heresies, which in the course of denying what the Christian faith is not, effectively asserts what it is. The majority of this work was lost for many centuries and only rediscovered in a monastery on Mount Athos in 1842. Many passages from it are used in the Office of Readings.

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.

Other notes: Stanisław Leon Kochanski (1923 - 1999)

On this day in 1999 died Staszek Kochanski, father of Martin Kochanski, the founder of Universalis. Please pray for the repose of his soul; and for his son and daughter, who survive him.
  If you would like to follow the funeral service, you can do so here.

Mid-morning reading (Terce)Apocalypse 3:19-20 ©
I am the one who reproves and disciplines all those he loves: so repent in real earnest. Look, I am standing at the door, knocking. If one of you hears me calling and opens the door, I will come in to share his meal, side by side with him.

Noon reading (Sext)Isaiah 44:21-22 ©
Remember these things, Jacob, and that you are my servant, Israel. I have formed you, you are my servant; Israel, I will not forget you. I have dispelled your faults like a cloud, your sins like a mist. Come back to me, for I have redeemed you.

Afternoon reading (None)Galatians 6:7-8 ©
What a man sows, he reaps. If he sows in the field of self-indulgence he will get a harvest of corruption out of it; if he sows in the field of the Spirit he will get from it a harvest of eternal life.

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Scripture readings taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.
 
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