Bucharest, December 20, 2023
Photo: basilica.ro
The Romanian Patriarchate will continue its tradition of dedicating every new year to a specific theme with the proclamation of 2024 as the honorary year of pastoral care and care for the sick.
The year will also be dedicated to the Holy Unmercenary Healers, reports the Romanian Church’s Basilica News Agency.
In his message for 2024, His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel spoke of the need to intensify care for those suffering both mentally and physically. Next year’s theme is also a natural continuation of this 2023’s theme of pastoring the elderly.
“The Church teaches that caring for the suffering is a concrete, visible manifestation of merciful love and that bodily health is closely linked to spiritual health. Health, Patriarch Daniel repeatedly explained, is a gift from God, not something we deserve, and it must be preserved and cultivated,” the Agency writes.
“Given that the Savior Christ is the main model in caring for the sick and that He often worked wonderfully through the saints, in the commemorative year of pastoral care and the care of the sick, all the Unmercenary Healer saints will be commemorated.”
These saints include St. Luke the Evangelist, the Equal-to-the-Apostles St. Thekla, the Unmercenaries commemorated in the Proskomedia, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, St. Spyridon, St. Nektarios of Aegina, St. Luke of Crimea, St. Nikephoros the Leper, and others.
The formal proclamation will take place on January 1 after the Divine Liturgy in the Patriarchal Cathedral.
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