Speech Given to Students of the Newly Opened Free of Charge Sunday School (St. John of Kronstadt)

Speech Given to Students of the Newly Opened Free of Charge Sunday School

By St. John of Kronstadt

My friends! A Sunday School has been opened for you today, with God's blessing, for free: and the books in it are ready for you and everything you need for studying. It is called a Sunday School because you will come to it on Sundays, and on other feasts of the Lord, and of the Mother of God.

Do not think that it is a sin to go to school on feast days. No, it is not sinful, but soul-saving. Rather than sitting at home, or doing something idle, or wandering the streets, it is better, without a doubt, to occupy yourself with study for an hour or two. Learning is light, which means that it is a good deed, and when is the time for a good deed, if not on a feast day? On a feast day you do not work, according to the fourth commandment of the Lord; according to that commandment, one must work six days a week, if there is no feast day, and on the seventh, that is, on Sunday, one must go to church – to pray to the Lord, our Creator, to venerate His most pure Body and Blood at the Liturgy, to listen to the word of God, to remember God's mercy to us, and to think about eternal life. For all of us, brethren, will be resurrected in due time for another, never-ending life in heaven. This is a very important matter, and that is why, among other things, the no work day of Sunday is given to us, that is why we must certainly go to church on Sundays, so that, having venerated Christ's resurrection, we may remember our own resurrection from the dead, in order to prepare our souls for a joyful, and not a sorrowful resurrection.

When Saint Panteleimon Talks To One of Your Students

By Vasilis Frangos

Lately I have often been talking with D. who is in his first year of High School. He tells me that he likes History very much and is looking for the lives of various heroes in Byzantium. We were talking a lot about them yesterday. Yesterday, however, he told me that he was reading the lives of Saints, such as Saint Nicholas Planas, who was celebrating, and a Neomartyr, unknown to me. We used to say that the Saints are always by our side, when we talk about them and read their lives.

At that moment he spontaneously tells me that he especially loves Saint Panteleimon. To my question why him in particular, he replied that the Saint was a doctor and he would like to become a doctor himself. But the most shocking thing I heard at the end: he told me that he once saw Saint Panteleimon himself in his dream saying to him:

Saint Sophrony and the Children That Visited Him

Father Paisios the Mathematician was a direct disciple of Saint Paisios the Athonite and the spiritual father of the female Monastery of Saint Hilarion near the village of Promachoi in the Municipality of Aridaia. One of his neighbors was a little girl named Chryse, and according to him she once went to visit Saint Sophrony with her mother. The Saint had never met them before, but as soon as he saw Chryse he welcomed her by name, saying: "Welcome Chrysoula! I knew a little girl would come from Greece!" And when the girl's mother asked the Saint to bless the child, he said: "Why should I bless her! I wish where this child will go, I will go too!" Shortly after this meeting and the photo taken above, Chryse passed away.

Parable of the Sparrow and Two Sisters

Two little sisters, after listening to the biblical story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, said to their dad:

"Dad, if Lena and I were in paradise, we would never eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After all, God didn’t allow for it to be touched, isn't that right, dad?

“Correct,” the father smiled and put the children to bed.

The next morning, the father got up before everyone else, caught a sparrow in the yard and put it in a saucepan. Having woken up the girls, he showed them the saucepan, placed it on the windowsill of the open window in the kitchen and said:

Encyclical on the Catechism of the Youth (Metr. Hierotheos of Nafpaktos)

 

My beloved brethren,

By decision of the Sacred Synod, the Catechism for male and female students begins again this year, which is a serious work of the Church, by which young people are introduced to the blessed institution of the Church.

Normally, Catechism precedes the mystery of Baptism, because first one gets to know the life of the Church and then enters it.

Since, however, with the passage of time, infant baptism was introduced into the Church, that is, a person is baptized a short time after their birth, while they are still an infant, for this reason the Catechetical Schools began to function from a long time ago, for those who were preparing to be baptized who were of mature age, and for the illumined, that is, for those who had been baptized.