The Holy Machabees, Martyrs
Ss. Machabaeorum Martyrum
The Holy Machabees were seven brothers who, with their mother, suffered death rather than transgress the law of God — martyrs of the Old Covenant whom the Church has long honoured among her own.
On the first of August the Church keeps the memory of the Holy Machabees, the seven brothers who, together with their mother and the aged scribe Eleazar, gave their lives for the law of God in the days before the coming of Christ. Their story is told in the Second Book of the Machabees, among the sacred Scriptures, and recounts how, in a time of fierce persecution under a foreign king, they chose torment and death rather than betray the faith and the commandments of their fathers.
Faithful unto death
The Scripture relates how the seven brothers were seized and commanded, under cruel torture, to eat what the law of God forbade. One after another they refused, encouraging one another to die nobly, and professing their hope in the resurrection and in the God who had given them life and would restore it. Their mother, who watched her sons suffer in a single day, is praised above all: filled with a noble spirit, she exhorted each of them in her own tongue to be faithful, bearing her sorrow with courage because she set her hope in God; and last of all she too died.
Though they lived before the coming of our Saviour, the Holy Machabees have been venerated by the Church from early times as true martyrs, witnesses to the one God and to the hope of the resurrection. Saint Augustine and other Fathers honoured them, and their memory was kept at Antioch and afterward throughout the Church. They stand as a sign that the grace of God strengthened the faithful of the Old Covenant, as it would the martyrs of the New, to count fidelity to God dearer than life itself.
The Collect
Patronage
They are venerated as martyrs of the Old Covenant and are remembered as models of fidelity to the law of God and of hope in the resurrection.
In the Modern Calendar
In the modern calendar this commemoration is no longer kept on the universal calendar.
Common Questions
When is the feast of the Holy Machabees?
Their commemoration is kept on 1 August in the calendar of the 1962 Roman Missal, as a Fourth Class feast. In the modern calendar it is no longer observed on the universal calendar.
Who were the Holy Machabees?
They were seven brothers who, with their mother, suffered death rather than transgress the law of God in a time of persecution before the coming of Christ. Their story is told in the Second Book of the Machabees in the Old Testament. Though martyrs of the Old Covenant, they have long been venerated by the Church.
Why does the Church honour martyrs from before Christ?
The Church sees in the Holy Machabees the same grace of God that would later strengthen the Christian martyrs — fidelity to God unto death and firm hope in the resurrection. Their veneration, attested by the early Fathers, witnesses that God’s faithful of every age belong to the one communion of saints.
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