November 9
Nectarius of Egina (1846-1920) monk and pastor
Today the Church of Greece commemorates one of its most popular saints, Nectarius of Egina, who was a monk and metropolitan of Pentapolis.
Born in Silyvria, Thrace, in 1846, he was named Anastasius Kephalas. After a ten-year sojourn on the island of Chios, he received monastic tonsure at the New Monastery and took the name of Lazarus, which he changed to Nectarius a year later upon being ordained a deacon.
He went to Athens and met the patriarch of Alexandria, Sophronius, who financed Nectarius' theological studies and ordained him a priest of the Alexandrian church of St. Sava. Nectarius earned renown as a preacher and was elected metropolitan of Pentapolis by Sophronius, but his radical faithfulness to the Gospel attracted the hostility of others in the patriarchate. Leaving Egypt, Nectarius returned to Greece and directed an ecclesiastical academy for fifteen years. He eventually retired to Holy Trinity monastery in Egina, which he himself had ordered built in 1904.
Nectarius was known and loved throughout Greece for his spiritual writings, but also for the serenity with which he accepted the humiliation his integrity had brought upon him.
He died at the age of seventy-four, on November 8, 1920.
Jewish martyrs of Kristalnacht
(m. 1938)
In 1935, Hitler issued the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor and declared that if the "Jewish question" were not resolved politically, it would be necessary to proceed to a "final solution."
On November 7, 1938, a German diplomat was killed in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew who was mentally ill and distraught over the recent expulsion of eighteen thousand Polish Jews from Germany. For the Nazis, this event confirmed the existence of an international Jewish plot against Germany.
Now determined to exterminate the Jews en masse, on the night of November 9, 1938 the Nazis organized a pogrom throughout Germany. Havoc ensued with the buring of 191 synagogues, the destruction of 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, the murder of 91 Jews, and the deportation of 26,000 people to concentration camps. The arresting spectacle of streets filled with the glass fragments of thousands of shattered windows gave this attack the name by which it is remembered, Kristalnacht.
The international community immediately received word of what had happened, but organized only feeble and ineffective protests against the perpetrators of the massacre.
THE CHURCHES REMEMBER...
ANGLICANS:
Margery Kempe (14th-15th cent.), mystic
WESTERN CATHOLICS:
Dedication of St John Lateran Basilica (4th cent.; Roman and Ambrosian calendars)
COPTS AND ETHIOPIANS (30 babah/teqemt):
Abraham of Manuf (4th cent.), hermit (Coptic Church)
King Yeshaq (Ethiopian Church)
LUTHERANS:
Emil Frommell (d. 1896), preacher in Baden and at Berlin
MARONITES:
Matrona the Rightous (5th-6th cent.), nun
ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS AND GREEK CATHOLICS:
Onesiphorus and Porphyrius (5th cent.), martyrs
Matrona of Constantinople, igumen
Theoctiste of Lesbo (9th cent.), nun
Nectarius of Aegina, bishop of Pentapolis (Greek Church)
Claude, Castorius, Symphorian, Nicostratus and companions of Pannonia (d. ca. 304), martyrs (Romanian Church)