Great Martyr Catherine of Alexandria

Catherine was a maiden of Alexandria of noble birth, renowned for beauty and for learning in philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. According to her passion, after a vision of the Theotokos and the Christ Child she was betrothed mystically to Christ. When the emperor Maxentius (or Maximinus) held a pagan festival, she confronted him, confessing Christ and exposing the vanity of the idols. The emperor summoned fifty of his finest orators to refute her; instead, her wisdom converted them, and they were burned as Christians. Refusing the emperor's offers of marriage and power, she was scourged and imprisoned, where she converted the empress and the general Porphyrius with his soldiers. The spiked wheels devised for her torture were shattered by an angel, and she was finally beheaded. Tradition holds that angels carried her body to Mount Sinai, where the great monastery bears her name.