Come, ring out our joy to the Lord; hail the God who saves us, alleluia.
Year: C(I). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: Green.
In other years: Saint Bartholomew, Apostle
He was born at Cana and brought by the Apostle Philip to meet Jesus. Nothing further is known for certain. Eusebius speaks of him in India, but the Roman Martyrology has him martyred in Armenia, skinned alive according to the Persian custom. Because his relics were enshrined on the island in the Tiber that is principally used as a hospital, he has become a patron saint of the sick.
Liturgical colour: green
The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the orderly sequence of weeks through the year, a season in which we are being neither single-mindedly penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).
Other notes: Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888 - 1957)
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was born into a Church of England family (his father later became Bishop of Manchester and his grandfather was Bishop of Lahore), and had a brilliant career at Oxford and afterwards in the Church of England. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1917, after having inspired many of his friends to do the same.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the Church’s great apologists both in the newspapers and in books, making his points with equal parts of wit, charity, and cogency. Several of his opponents joined the Church in their turn, not coerced or converted by him, but inspired by his example and with their difficulties removed.
He was the Catholic Chaplain at Oxford from 1926 to 1939, where he equipped several generations of young men for the difficult transition from Catholic schools, where the faith was taken for granted, to the wider world, where it was met with indifference or outright hostility.
He translated the entire Bible into English, both the Old and the New Testaments, in a heroic single-handed project undertaken at the request of the English Catholic bishops; but it is by his spiritual writings (especially A Retreat for Lay People) and by his apologetic and doctrinal works that he is most worthily remembered.
Mary of Holyrood may smile indeed,
Knowing what grim historic shade It shocks
To see wit, laughter and the Popish creed,
Cluster and sparkle in the name of Knox.
– G.K. Chesterton