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Saint Symeon the New Theologian

Abbot of Saint Mamas whose teaching on prayer earned him the name New Theologian

Honoured as
the New Theologian
Western calendar
Not kept
Orthodox calendar
12 March, transferred to 12 October, since 12 March falls in Great Lent (25 March on the old calendar)

Symeon was born in Paphlagonia in 949 and was being prepared for a career at court when, at fourteen, he met the elder Symeon the Pious of the Studion, under whose guidance he resolved to repeat constantly, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me." One night as he prayed a light filled the room, and "it seemed to him that he himself became light". For twenty-five years he was abbot of Saint Mamas in Constantinople, and when some of his monks attacked him he asked that they be treated with leniency. His teaching on prayer earned him the name the New Theologian, though it also brought him exile across the Bosphorus, where he fell asleep in the Lord in 1021.

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Feast days, two calendars and patron saints

A saint’s feast day is the day each year when the Church remembers that saint in its worship, and for most saints it is the day they died. These are among the oldest days in the Christian year: after Easter and Pentecost, and Christmas and Epiphany in the fourth century, the next feasts the Church kept were those of the apostles and the martyrs.

Many saints have two dates in the finder because the Western and Orthodox Churches built their calendars separately over many centuries. Sometimes they remember the same saint on different days: the West keeps Saint Jude with Saint Simon on 28 October, while the Orthodox keep him on 19 June. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Church, also still follow the old Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind the one on our walls, so their 6 December falls on our 19 December. Where that happens the finder gives both dates.

A patron saint is a saint the Church has come to ask for help in a particular place, work or need, “a special intercessor with God and the proper advocate”, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it. Some patronages were declared by a pope, as when Pius IX named Saint Joseph patron of the whole Church in 1870; most grew from long tradition, as with Saint Anthony and the things we lose.

We chose the first two hundred saints by what people search for most, by name, by need and by date, and added the saints Orthodox Christians look for and the apostles. Then we added a saint for each of the 138 days that still had none, so every day of the year now has at least one, and forty more of the saints people search for: 378 entries in all. Every fact in an entry comes from a source we checked and name under it: the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Orthodox Church in America’s lives of the saints, Vatican News and the Holy See’s own documents. Where a saint’s story comes to us mostly from legend, the entry says so.