Daily Martyrology for November 11

In 397, at Tours, St. Martin, monk and bishop. According to his biographer, Sulpicius Severus, who knew Martin personally, Martin was born in Hungary, but raised in Pavia, Italy. His father forbade him to become a Christian and forced him to become a soldier like himself. He was serving near Amiens when he cut his cloak in half to share it with a beggar, an event which is often depicted in art. He left the army and settled as a hermit at Ligugé, near Poitiers. A community formed around him. In 362, over his objections, he was made bishop of Tours. As bishop he lived as a monk in a community he founded called Marmoutier. One of his key preoccupations was to bring Christianity to rural areas.

In 826, in Bithynia, St. Theodore the Studite. He became abbot of a monastery at an early age. He was several times exiled for rebuking moral lapses in Byzantine rulers and for his defense of images. Eventually he became abbot of the monastery of Studios at Constantinople. The wise and prudent observances he developed there were adopted by many monasteries.

About 1050, at the abbey of Grottaferrata, near Rome, St. Bartholomew, who with St. Nilus (September 26), was instrumental in founding that abbey.

In 1952, in Bulgaria, three Assumptionist priests, and the bishop of Nikopol, Eugene Bossilkov, who were shot in Sofia by the Communist regime.

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Our daily martyrology was written by Fr. Hugh Feiss, OSB. Copyright © 2008 by the Monastery of the Ascension, Jerome, ID 83338.