SEPTEMBER 11TH, FERIA;
Commemoration of Sts. Protus and Hyacinth, Martyrs
Month in honor of the Seven Dolours of the BVM.
Let us remember in prayer those who lost their lives on this day 25 years ago in New York.
Today, in the Roman Martyrology is listed —
St. Paphnutius, Bishop and Confessor
The holy confessor Paphnutius was an Egyptian, and after having spent several years in the desert as a hermit, under the direction of the great St. Antony, was made Bishop in Upper Thebais. He was one of those confessors who, under the tyrant, the Roman Emperor Maximin (Daia), had their right eye torn out and were afterwards sent to work in the mines. Sozomen and Theodoret add that his left hamstring was cut, by which we are to understand that the sinews were cut so as to render the left leg lame [making it harder for him to run away]. The historian Eusebius takes note that this punishment was inflicted on many Christians in that bloody reign. Peace being at last restored to the Church, Paphnutius returned to his flock, bearing all the rest of his life the glorious marks of his sufferings for the name of his crucified Lord. The Arian heresy being broached in Egypt, he was one of the most zealous in defending the Catholic Faith, and for his eminent sanctity and the glorious title of Confessor (that is, one who had confessed the faith before the persecutors, and under torments), he was highly considered in the great Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Constantine the Great, during the celebration of that Synod, sometimes conferred privately with him in his palace and never dismissed him without kissing respectfully the place where the eye he had lost for the Faith was once situated.
The Fathers of the council of Nice, in the third canon, strictly forbid all clergymen to entertain in their houses any women, except a mother, aunt, sister, or such as could leave no room for suspicion. St. Paphnutius remained always in a close union with St. Athanasius and the other Catholic prelates. He and St. Potamon, bishop of Heraclea, with forty-seven other Egyptian Bishops, accompanied their holy patriarch Athanasius to the Council of Tyre, in 335, where they found much the greater part of the members who composed that assembly to be professed Arians. Paphnutius seeing Maximus, Bishop of Jerusalem, among them, and full of concern to find an orthodox prelate who like him had suffered in the late persecution, in such bad company, took him by the hand, led him out, and told him that he could not see that one who bore the same marks as he in defence of the Faith should be seduced and imposed upon by persons that were resolved to oppress the most strenuous asserter [St. Athanasius] of its fundamental article. He then let him into the whole plot of the Arians, which, till that moment, had been a secret to the good Bishop of Jerusalem, who by this means was put upon his guard against the crafty insinuations of hypocrites, and fixed forever in communion with St. Athanasius. We have no particular account of the death of St. Paphnutius, but his name stands in the Roman Martyrology on the 11th of September.