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When is Saint Panteleimon’s Memorial Day celebrated?
The saint is commemorated annually 9 August. On this day, it is important to remember that we must serve not only God, but also people: all people are morally or bodily, sick in one way or another. Everyone can and should be healed. And every good deed and every good word is healing.
The story of the life of St. Panteleimon
Finding the Christian Faith
His mother, a secret Christian, brought up Panteleimon in good manners and communion with the Church of Christ. But she died early and then the boy grew up with a pagan father. He gave him to be trained by the doctor Euphrosynus. During this period, Panteleimon for the first time showed the qualities of his character that corresponded to his name: “the lion in everything.”
He quickly mastered the art of healing so well that he even surpassed his teacher. And soon the whole city learned about the young healer.
In addition to his medical skills, Pantoleon was distinguished by his extraordinary breadth of soul and the ability to deeply sympathize with the pain of others. He visited the afflicted in the dungeons and generously distributed to the needy the inheritance left by his father.
So Pantoleon attracted the attention of the priest Yermolai, who secretly lived in Nicodemia, who enlightened the young man with the true faith and baptized him.
The gift of healing through prayer
The young doctor Pantoleon served people so gratuitously that for the diligent fulfillment of his duty he received the gift of healing through prayer. And he used it on all patients without exception. There was no difference – a poor, rich, beggar vagabond or a gentleman of a high class. And, as already mentioned, Pantoleon did not take money for healing. After all, pain equalizes people equally. And this position, in modern terms, was a serious commercial competition to other doctors. They began to lose their own earnings and literally hated their disinterested colleague.
Betrayal of colleagues
From envy and hatred, the doctors of Nicomedia reported on Pantoleon to Emperor Maximian. They said that a certain doctor heals Christian prisoners, thereby signing the sentence to Pantoleon. Maximian became widely famous as an ardent persecutor of everything Christian, and on his account there were thousands of tortured, burned, crippled souls.
He ordered the healer to be seized, and then forced him to renounce Christ. But Pantoleon was strong in his faith and refused the emperor. For this, Maximian betrayed him to the most severe torment.
Panteleimon – “all-merciful”
The Lord strengthened the great martyr, and he courageously endured tortures and denounced the tormentor. Panteleimon was sentenced to the beheading, but the saint had not yet finished his prayer, and when the executioner struck him with a sword, he did not inflict a wound on him.
Struck by what they saw, they exclaimed: “Great is the Christian God!”, fell on their knees and began to ask Pantoleon to pray for the forgiveness of their sins. And he prayed for his tormentors. At the end, a voice was heard from heaven, affirming the change of his name to the corresponding life and feat – Panteleimon – “all-merciful.”
What to pray to St. Panteleimon
The saint of God, the passion-bearer and healer Panteleimon is a merciful healer, the patron saint of warriors, who is an Orthodox miracle of healing the sick, stopping epidemics and pestilence. He is also approached with a prayer for the healing of mental ulcers.