Universalis
Thursday 7 August 2025    (other days)
Thursday of week 18 in Ordinary Time 
 or Saints Sixtus II, Pope, and his Companions, Martyrs 
 or Saint Cajetan, Priest 

Using calendar: Asia - India - Goa & Daman. You can change this.

Come before the Lord, singing with joy.

Year: C(I). Psalm week: 2. Liturgical Colour: Green.

Pope St Sixtus II and his companions ( - 258)

Sixtus was elected Pope in 257. Twelve months later, on 6th August, as he was celebrating Mass in the catacomb of St Calixtus, he was seized by the authorities (it was the time of Valerian’s persecution) and beheaded along with four of his deacons. He was buried in the same catacomb.
  St Laurence, another deacon, was captured and executed four days later.
  We know most of the details of this martyrdom from a letter of St Cyprian, who was himself martyred later in the same year.
  See the article in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

St Cajetan (1480 - 1547)

He was born in Vicenza and became a priest at the age of 36. He worked hard for the poor and the sick and for the reform of the Church; with this last aim in mind, he founded a congregation of secular priests which became known as the Theatines. These had three functions: preaching, the administration of the sacraments, and the celebration of the liturgy.
  He encouraged the growth of pawn-shops as a means of helping the poor out of temporary financial difficulties and keeping them out of the hands of usurers. His congregation also cared for incurable syphilitics (a particularly virulent form of syphilis was sweeping Europe, having been imported from the Caribbean by Columbus’s men).
  His example encouraged many others on the path to active sanctity. He said [in a letter to Elisabeth Porto]: “Do not receive Christ in the Blessed Sacrament so that you may use him as you judge best, but give yourself to him and let him receive you in this Sacrament, so that he himself, God your saviour, may do to you and through you whatever he wills.”
  See the article in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

Other saints: Bl. Nicholas Postgate (1598 - 1679)

Middlesbrough
Nicholas Postgate was born around 1598 at Kirkdale House, Egton, one of the children of James and Margaret Postgate. His father died in 1602 leaving his widow with four young children to bring up. His mother was fined several times for non-attendance at the parish church before her death in 1624. The influence of missionary priests in the area probably led to Nicholas leaving home in 1621 to attend the training college for Catholic priests at Douai in northern France. Ordained priest on 2 April 1629 and knowing that he faced a sentence of death if he was caught, he returned to England on 29 June 1630.
  His first home was at Saxton near Tadcaster, later moving to Holderness in East Yorkshire. After the death of Lady Dunbar in 1659 he is believed to have gone to Everingham. He was over 60 years of age when he returned to his native moors and settled in a small thatched cottage at Ugthorpe near Whitby. Here he lived in virtual poverty serving the Catholics of the whole of the North Yorkshire moors from northern Cleveland to well south of Whitby and inland to Pickering. In 1664 he wrote to the President of the English College at Douai that during his 34 years working in Yorkshire he had performed 226 marriages, baptised 593 infants and buried 719 dead. He also brought 2,400 persons into the Catholic Church.
  On 8 December 1678 Father Postgate walked from Red Barn Farm at Littlebeck to baptise the infant son of Matthew and Mary Lythe. Unfortunately John Reeves, an Excise Collector from Whitby, decided to organise a search at Red Barn Farm in the hope of finding a connection with the Titus Oates Plot. Arriving as the baptism was taking place and finding Catholic books, relics, wafers etc, he arrested Father Postgate together with Matthew Lythe and two other farmers.
  The following day after appearing before Magistrate Sir William Cayley, at Brompton, he was sent to York to await trial. The trial was lengthy and in 1679 he was indicted for high treason for being a Catholic priest. The death of the 83 year old priest took place on 7 August 1679 at the Knavesmire, York, where he was hung, drawn and quartered, which the Law inflicted on Catholic priests.
  Ever since his death, Father Nicholas Postgate has been honoured not only by local Catholics but by families who have moved abroad.
  On 22 November 1987, along with 84 other martyrs, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II.
Middlesbrough Ordo

Other saints: St Albert of Trapani (c.1240-1307)

7 Aug (where celebrated)
Albert is one of the earliest saints of the Carmelite Order remembered in the liturgical calendar, along with St Angelus and St Simon Stock. Like these other saints, his life is captured in the tradition that grew up around his memory, following his death, a tradition that is recorded in the legends written about him in the mid to late 14th century. Albert was born in Trapani, Sicily, in the mid-1200s the only child of a married couple who had struggled for many years to conceive. As is likely to have been a tradition, he was dedicated to God by his parents in thanksgiving for his birth and later joined the Carmelites in Trapani. He was ordained a priest and during his life is known to have moved between Trapani and Messina, also serving for a time as the Carmelite Provincial of Sicily. As such, Albert would have been an instrumental person in the establishment of the Carmelites in Europe as a mendicant Order following their move from Mount Carmel. His contribution to the foundation of the Order in Europe is recognised by his naming in tradition as one of the ‘fathers’ of the Order along with St Angelus, also from Sicily. Tradition attributed to Albert the gifts of a skilled preacher, healer and reconciler, the spirit of which continues to be recognised by pilgrims who visit his relics. Albert died in Messina, Sicily, in 1307.
MT

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

Second Reading: Bishop Baldwin of Canterbury (- 1190)

Baldwin was born in Exeter, but his date of birth is unknown. He was ordained priest and made archdeacon by Bartholomew, Bishop of Exeter. He subsequently became a Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Ford, in Devonshire, and within a year was made Abbot of Ford. In 1180 he was promoted to the Bishopric of Worcester and in the same year was elected to the primatial see of Canterbury by the bishops of the province. The election was disputed by the monks of Canterbury, necessitating the intervention of King Henry II. Even after his appointment was ratified he was engaged in disputes with the Canterbury monks, so that King Richard and the Holy See had to become involved.
  Baldwin acted as legate in Wales, where he held a visitation in 1187. In 1188 he preached the Crusade, after having himself taken the cross on hearing the news of the loss of Jerusalem. In 1190 he set out for the Holy Land, in company with Hubert, Bishop of Salisbury, and others, providing at his own expense two hundred knights and three hundred retainers. While there he acted a vicegerent of the patriarch. He died during the siege of Acre, leaving all he possessed for the relief of the Holy Land and naming Bishop Hubert as his executor.
  The Spiritual Tractates were written almost entirely during the decade Baldwin lived at Ford, probably as sermons which were later re-cast. They reveal a man thoroughly and happily at home in Cistercian spirituality, an acute theologian well aware of contemporary currents, and one of the last true representatives of the rich patristic-monastic tradition. The Tractate on the Angel’s Salutation, in particular (read on Thursday of the 20th week in Ordinary Time), marks an important stage in the evolution of Marian spirituality.

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).

Mid-morning reading (Terce)Galatians 5:13-14
My brothers, you were called, as you know, to liberty; but be careful, or this liberty will provide an opening for self-indulgence. Serve one another, rather, in works of love, since the whole of the Law is summarised in a single command: Love your neighbour as yourself.

Noon reading (Sext)Galatians 5:16-17
Let me put it like this: if you are guided by the Spirit you will be in no danger of yielding to self-indulgence, since self-indulgence is the opposite of the Spirit, the Spirit is totally against such a thing, and it is precisely because the two are so opposed that you do not always carry out your good intentions.

Afternoon reading (None)Galatians 5:22,23,25
What the Spirit brings is very different: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control. Since the Spirit is our life, let us be directed by the Spirit.

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