Perhaps you missed it in the clown show circus, shampeachment event but today's the Feast of St. Edmund, King and Martyr. Edmund was King of East Anglia in the second half of the 9th century A.D.
He was a model ruler who refused to listen to sneaky, lying, perfidious informant spies, focusing his energies instead on the Christian life and fighting the heathen Vikings.
The latter killed him in 870, torturing the martyr king in a failed attempt to make Edmund renounce his faith before shooting him to death with arrows. The King's shrine was established at the abbey church of Bury St. Edmunds, where it remained until the impious monarch Henry VIII destroyed it in a fit of crazed greed.
Here's his Collect:
O God of ineffable tenderness, who didst enable the most blessed King, Edmund, to overcome his enemy by laying down his life for Thy Name, mercifully grant that we, Thy servants, may, by his intercession, overcome and destroy in ourselves the temptations of our old enemy. Through our Lord . . .
God bless,
LSP
