SAINTS OF THE DAY FOR APRIL 05

SAINTS OF THE DAY FOR APRIL 05 

Martyrs of London. Three groups of martyrs who were put to death in the late sixteenth century in London by English authorities.  (d. 1582) Martyrs executed for treason, by virtue of their supposed complicity in the entirely spurious plot known as the “Conspiracy of Reims and Rome.” (d. 1588) A group that suffered martyrdom following the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the increase of anti-Catholic feeling in Elizabethan England. (d. 1591) A group suffering martyrdom as a result of the British government’s enforcement of anti-Catholic policies.  

St. Ethelburga, 647 A.D.  Wife of King St. Edwin of Northumbria, England, daughter of St. Ethelbert of Kent, also called Tate. St. Paulinus was her chaplain. Ethelburga converted King St. Edwin, and when he died, she founded a convent at Lyminge. Ethelburga served as abbess until her death.   

St. Derferl-Gadarn, 5th or 6th century. Welsh hermit, reported to have been in the battle of Camblan, where King Arthur died. He may have been a hermit before becoming a monk at Lianderfel, in Gwynedd, Wales. A carved-wood statue depicting Derfel-Gadarn as a mounted soldier was used to burn Blessed John Forest at Smithfield in 1538, by order of Thomas Cromwell. 

ST. IRENE, VIRGIN AND MARTYR

Peace, charity and purity: these were the baptismal names assumed by the three martyr sisters in Thessaloniki in 304 under the governor Dulcitius, during Diocletian's persecutions. Irene was the youngest; she was guilty of hiding the Holy Scripture and refusing to eat food offered to the gods.   April 5

ST GALLA, ROMAN WIDOW

a Roman widow of the sixth century; feast, October 5. According to St. Gregory the Great (Dial. IV, ch. xiii) she was the daughter of the younger Symmachus, a learned and virtuous patrician of Rome, whom Theodoric had unjustly condemned to death (525). Becoming a widow before the end of the first year of her married life, she, still very young, founded a convent and hospital near St. Peter’s, there spent the remainder of her days in austerities and works of mercy, April 6

St. Maria Crescentia Hoss, Roman Catholic Nun. She was a contemplative nun of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis. Feastday April 5

Martyrs of Lesbos, Five virgin Roman Catholic maidens who suffered martyrdom for the faith on the Greek island of Lesbos

ST. VINCENT FERRER, DOMINICAN