A wealthy nobleman who renounced his possessions to embrace monastic life and became abbot of the monastery of Catabad.
Our Venerable Father Nikephoros, Abbot of Catabad
Nikephoros, commemorated as the Abbot of Catabad, was a Byzantine monastic born at Constantinople into a wealthy and illustrious family. According to the synaxarion, his parents, Andrew and Theodora, raised him in the Christian faith; after their deaths he distributed his inheritance to the poor and withdrew across the Bosphorus to Chalcedon, where he entered the Monastery of Saint Andrew and took up its strict ascetic discipline.
Recognized for his fervor in prayer and labor, he was sent by his abbot as a missionary to a Phoenician island, where he was appointed superior of a monastery dedicated to the Theotokos. He spent the remainder of his life there in missionary work before being returned, at his own request, to Chalcedon for burial. He is venerated as a venerable (monastic) father, with his feast kept on April 19.
By a flood of tears you made the desert fertile,
and your longing for God brought forth fruits in abundance.
By the radiance of miracles you illumined the whole universe!
O our holy father Nicephorus, pray to Christ our God to save our souls!
Text used with permission of the Orthodox Church in America (oca.org).
By his own request, Nikephoros's body was carried by ship to Chalcedon and buried by the brethren of the Monastery of Saint Andrew, the community in which he had begun his monastic life. The surviving accounts record no later translation of his relics or details of an established shrine.
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