Unlike most days in the sanctoral cycle, this feast celebrates not a saint's death but an event in his life: the moment on the Damascus road when a light from heaven struck Saul to the ground and a voice asked, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" The Acts of the Apostles tells the story three times, a sign of how decisive the Church judged it to be, and Paul himself refers to it repeatedly in his letters as the source of his apostolate. The observance is attested in the West from the early Middle Ages and was extended to the whole Roman Church by the thirteenth century. The feast is kept with white vestments and the Gloria. The first reading is Paul's own account of the event before the crowd in Jerusalem, or the narrative from the ninth chapter of Acts, and the Gospel is the Lord's commission to go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. The prayers of the Mass ask that the Church, which learned the Gospel through Paul's preaching, may follow him toward God. January 25 closes the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which begins on January 18. That placement is deliberate: the day the Church remembers a man wholly changed by Christ is the day she prays that Christians divided among themselves may be made one. In Rome the Pope has traditionally presided at Vespers on this evening in the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, which stands over the apostle's tomb, together with representatives of other Christian communions. Saint Paul is also honored, with Saint Peter, in the solemnity of June 29.

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January 25

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