Saints of the Day & More

St. Pachomius was born about 292 in the Upeer Thebaid in Egypt and was inducted into the Emperor's army as a twenty-year-old. The great kindness of Christians at Thebes toward the soldiers became embedded in his mind and led to his conversion after his discharge. After being baptized, he became a disciple of an anchorite, Palemon, and took the habit. The two of them led a life of extreme austerity and total dedication to God; they combined manual labor with unceasing prayer both day and night. Later, Pachomius felt called to build a monastery on the banks of the Nile at Tabennisi; so about 318 Palemon helped him build a cell there and even remained with him for a while. In a short time some one hundred monks joined him and Pachomius organized them on principles of community living. So prevalent did the desire to emulate the life of Pachomius and his monks become, that the holy man was obliged to establish ten other monasteries for men and two nunneries for women. Before his death i...

Macario was born in upper Egypt, around 300, and spent his youth as a shepherd. Driven by an intense grace, retired from an early age, confined to a narrow cell where he divided his time between prayer, penitential practices and the manufacture of mats. A woman falsely accused him that he had attempted to do violence. As a result, Macario was dragged through the streets, beaten and treated as hypocritical disguised as a monk. All suffered with patience, and even sent the woman the product of his work, saying: "Macario, now you have to work harder, because you have to hold to another." But God made known his innocence: the woman who had slandered him could not give birth until they revealed the name of the father of the child. This brings the fury of the people turned to admiration for the humility and patience of a saint. To escape the esteem of men, Macario took refuge in the vast desert Scete melancholy, when I was about thirty years. Here he lived sixty years and was the s...