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Shortly after Askold and Dir founded Kiev in 862, they launched a brazen but ill-fated assault on the capital of the Roman Empire.
In the 860s, just as the Great Army led by Vikings Ingwaer and Halfdan was swarming over England, Viking warlords Askold and Dir were establishing the great cities of Novgorod and Kiev as the foundations of Rus’. Almost at once the pagan settlers set their sights on the greatest prize of all, Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire.
St Gregory Palamas struggled all his life to stand up for the principle that the Bible means what it says.
St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), Archbishop of Thessalonica, is reckoned (alongside St Photius and St Mark of Ephesus) one of the three Pillars of Orthodoxy; the second Sunday of Lent is dedicated to him. His life was a unrelenting struggle against slander, brought about by his utter conviction that those passages in the Bible which speak of angels or heavenly lights being seen by men actually mean what they say.
Even before he was born, St Dunstan was marked out to lead the English Church and nation to more peaceful times.
In 793, Vikings swept across Northumbria and extinguished the beacon of Lindisfarne, symbol of England’s Christian civilisation. Much of the land lay under a pagan shadow for over a century, but St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of King Edgar (r. 959-975), helped to rekindle both Church and State.
A February celebration for which the faithful have brought candles to church since Anglo-Saxon times.
Candlemas is the English name for a Christian feast also known as the Presentation of Christ, the Purification of the Virgin, and the Meeting of the Lord. It is kept on February 2nd, forty days after Christmas, and in Anglo-Saxon times was a night of candle-lit processions and carol singing almost on a par with Easter.
In 1274, the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople signed a historic reunion, but there were some formidable dissenters.
In 1261, the Roman Emperor Michael Palaeologos won his battered empire back from the Crusaders, but Charles, Count of Anjou, was eager to reconquer the East and bring its ‘schismatic’ Christians under the Pope. Michael instructed the Greek Church to give in and save his crown, but twenty-six monks of Mount Athos were more concerned with their consciences.
An obscure officer in the Roman Army gains a dizzying promotion after performing a simple act of kindness.
In the fifth century, about the time when St Patrick was preaching in Ireland, far away in the Roman Empire’s glorious capital of Constantinople an obscure Roman soldier performed a kindness for a blind man which brought the most rapid promotion one could ever imagine.
A tenth-century Greek monk is joined by a total stranger for Mattins.
In the days of St Dunstan (r. 959-988), Archbishop of Canterbury to King Ethelred the Unready, over in Greece an otherwise comfortably obscure fellow monk – we still do not know his name – was entertaining a guest of even greater royalty.