Memorial of Saints (January 25)

Feasts, Obligatory and Optional Memorials of Saints

• Conversion of Paul, Apostle
• Artemas, martyr
• Juventinus and Maximinus, martyrs
• Publius, abbot
• Apollo, abbot
• Praejectus or Prix, bishop
• Poppo, abbot

St. Paul the Apostle (ca. 1/5-62/67 A.D.) was a prominent early Christian missionary. Originally a persecutor of those who follow the Christian faith, he had an encounter with Christ on his way to Damascus. Blinded by the experience, his conversion to the faith began. Pious stories, religious paintings and other art forms describe his encounter with Christ as falling from the horse after a blinding light. However, the Scripture account of his encounter with Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles does not mention anything about his travelling on a horse. This may have been interpretations of a plausible truth: he was on a long trip to Damascus. But the point of his conversion was this: St. Paul was called by Christ to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.

Being healed from his blindness and after being integrated gradually into the faith communities of the apostles, St. Paul began his missionary journeys to establish Christian communities around the eastern Mediterranean. He wrote letters (or epistles) to these communities and the manuscripts that survived from then on now form part of the canon of the New Testament. After much preaching and mission work, he was eventually arrested, imprisoned and executed sometime between 62 or 67 A.D.

As a Jew and a Pharisee, Paul believed in the oneness of God and the revelation of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. Then from his conversion experience, he became convinced about the centrality of Jesus Christ and the truth of His death and resurrection. He believed and preached that "in Christ" there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile (letters to the Galatians 3:28, and Romans 3:22). This Christian conviction extended to the belief that all are saved through faith in Christ rather than the law of Moses (Romans 3:21-30). No longer under the Mosaic law, Christians were now to be guided by the Holy Spirit and by faith working through love and service to one another, in the life and example of Christ and His apostles.

St. Paul is the patron saint of Greece and Malta, and the Cursillo movement.

Saints in the Byzantine Calendar [January 25]

• Gregory, the Theologian