Description

St Alypius the Stylite healing oil (Patron for Protection of Children)

St Alypius the Stylite healing oil (Patron for Protection of Children) from A Blessed Call To Love, Ireland.

Saint Alypius the Stylite was a seventh-century ascetic saint. He is revered as a monastic founder, an intercessor for the infertile, and a protector of children. During his lifetime he was a much sought-after starets (guide in the Christian spiritual life).

Alypius was born in the city of Hadrianopolis in Paphlagonia. His mother, who had widowed early, was very pious. She sent her son to educated by the bishop Theodore, gave all of her livelihood to the poor, and herself became a deaconess and lived an ascetic life.

Alypius venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church and those Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Byzantine Rite, as well as the Roman Catholic Church on November 26. For those churches which follow the Julian Calendar November 26 currently falls on December 9 of the modern Gregorian Calendar. After his death his relics  interred in the Church of St. Euphemia which he had built. His head preserved in the Monastery of Koutloumousiou on the Mount Athos.

Alypius recognised as one of the three great stylite ascetics along with Simeon Stylites the Elder and Daniel the Stylite. Herbert Thurston says of the Stylites that they did, in an age of terrible corruption and social decadence. Impress the need of penance more than anything else could have done upon the minds and imagination of Eastern Christians.

The demons which infested the pagan cemetery fell upon the ascetic by night and pelted him with stones. Saint Alypius, wanted nothing to stand in the way of the attacks of the spirits of darkness, then even took down the boards that served him as a roof, protecting him from the rain and wind. In the face of the saint’s conquering steadfastness, the demons forever fled the place, which had been sanctified by his deed of voluntary martyrdom.