to the Catholic Church to free souls from purgatory by some Catholic authors of the period. Luther disagreed with both indulgences and the concept of purgatory, and in his 1530 work Disavowl of Purgatory, he denied that 2 Maccabees was a valid source to cite. Luther was reported as having said: "I am so great an enemy to the second book of the Maccabees, and to Esther, that I wish they had not come to us at all, for they have too many heathen unnaturalities." The reformer Jean Calvin agreed with Luther's criticism of 2 Maccabees, and added his own criticism as well. Calvin propounded predestination, the doctrine that God has chosen the elect, and nothing can change this. Thus, the arguments from Clichtove and other Catholics that cited 2 Maccabees for the doctrine of the intercession of saints was suspect to him: for Calvin, salvation was strictly God's choice, and not a matter that dead saints could intervene on. Another issue Calvin and other Protestants raised was the self-effacing epilogue to 2 Maccabees, which Calvin took as an admission from the epitomist that he was not divinely inspired. In response to this, the Catholic Church went the opposite direction. While earlier Church Fathers had considered the deuterocanonical books useful but lesser than the main scriptures, the Catholic Church now affirmed that 2 Maccabees (and other deuterocanonical works) were in fact fully reliable as scripture at the Council of Trent in 1546. Modern status 2 Maccabees is still used to endorse the doctrine of resurrection of the dead, intercession of saints, and prayers for the dead to be released from purgatory in the Catholic tradition. The Latin Church Lectionary makes use of texts from 2 Maccabees 6 and 7, along with texts from 1 Maccabees 1 to 6, in the weekday readings for the 33rd week in Ordinary Time, in year 1 of the two-year cycle of readings, always in November, and as one of the options available for readings during a Mass for the Dead. The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches consider the book canonical. As in antiquity, the most notable section remains the martyrs, who are celebrated as saints by a variety of feast days. They are especially honored in Syriac Christianity, perhaps due to suffering persecution themselves; the mother of seven sons is known as Marth Shmouni in that tradition. In the Protestant tradition, the book