Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr

Catherine is known from her Life, which tells that she was a young woman of noble birth in Alexandria, learned in philosophy, in the reign of Maxentius at the beginning of the 4th century. It says she rebuked the emperor for persecuting Christians and argued with fifty philosophers he summoned to refute her, who were won over and put to death; that she was condemned to be broken on a spiked wheel, which shattered when it touched her; and that she was then beheaded. The account was later said to have been carried by angels to Mount Sinai, where the monastery bears her name. No early historian mentions her, and in 1969 her feast was removed from the general calendar; in 2002 it was restored as an optional memorial.