October 11
The saints and feasts remembered on October 11, each with a short life, a Bible passage and a prayer.
Saint John XXIII
Elderly pope who surprised the world by calling the Second Vatican Council
Angelo Roncalli was born in 1881 in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo in northern Italy, into a large family of poor sharecroppers. Ordained a priest in 1904, he served as a medical orderly and chaplain in the First World War. He spent nearly thirty years as a Vatican diplomat in Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and France. In Istanbul during the Second World War, he helped Jewish refugees escape the Nazis.
In 1958, at 76, he was elected pope, and many expected a quiet caretaker. Within three months he surprised everyone by calling the Second Vatican Council, which opened on 11 October 1962. That evening he told the crowd to go home and give their children a caress from the pope. He visited prisoners in Rome, reached out to other Christians and wrote Pacem in Terris, an appeal for peace in the nuclear age.
He died of cancer in 1963, before the Council ended. Remembered as “Good Pope John,” he was declared a saint in 2014.
that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.
John 17:21 · BSB
A prayer
God of peace, you gave your servant John a kind heart and the courage to open the windows of your Church to the world. Make us gentle and hopeful like him, ready to seek unity with all who follow Christ and to work for peace among the nations. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Philip the Deacon
Explained Isaiah to an Ethiopian traveller and baptised him by the road
Philip was one of seven men chosen by the first Christian community in Jerusalem, in the 30s AD, to make sure Greek-speaking widows received their fair share of the daily food. Nearly all we know of him comes from the book of Acts. He is not Philip the apostle, though later writers often confused the two.
When persecution broke out after Stephen was killed, the believers scattered. Philip went to Samaria, a region many Jews avoided, and crowds there listened to him gladly. Later, on a desert road toward Gaza, he ran up to the chariot of an Ethiopian court official who was reading Isaiah aloud. Philip asked whether he understood it, sat beside him, explained the passage, and baptised him in water by the roadside.
Years afterwards Paul stayed at the Caesarea home of Philip, whose four unmarried daughters prophesied. Acts calls him “the evangelist.” How and when he died is not known. Christians remember him as someone who crossed borders to share the good news with outsiders.
Then Philip began with this very Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus. As they traveled along the road and came to some water, the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is there to prevent me from being baptized?”
Acts 8:35–36 · BSB
A prayer
God of every nation, you sent your servant Philip to serve at tables, to preach in Samaria, and to open the Scriptures for a stranger on a desert road. Give us the same readiness to listen, to explain our hope simply, and to welcome those others pass by, so that many may come to know Jesus. Amen.
The lives are written with AI help from public-domain histories and checked before publishing; the prayers are ours. Bible quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), in the public domain. How we write.