Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me bring love. Where there is offense, let me bring pardon. Where there is discord, let me bring union. Where there is error, let me bring truth. Where there is doubt, let me bring faith. Where there is despair, let me bring hope. Where there is darkness, let me bring your light. Where there is sadness, let me bring joy. O Master, let me not seek as much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love, for it is in giving that one receives, it is in self-forgetting that one finds, it is in pardoning that one is pardoned, it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
This is a lovely set of sentiments, but it has been wrongly attributed to St Francis of Assisi. It is not found among the saint’s writings and experts point out that the self-centred orientation and repetition of “me” is completely out of character for Francis. Even more strangely, the prayer has been attributed to the murderous Norman, William the Conqueror, who overran England in 1066. In fact, the earliest mention of the poem is in an obscure Catholic publication in 1912, published by the League of the Holy Mass; it appeared anonymously but it may be the work of the League’s founder, Father Esther Bouquerel.
Schoolchildren are taught about the voyage of HMS Beagle and its five-year expedition that carried Charles Darwin around the world, providing him with the experiences that would lead to the publication of his theories of evolution. Less well-known is the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy (1805-65), who had brought Darwin on board as a gentleman companion. If his story is told at all, it is of a hide-bound traditionalist, at odds with Darwin on matters of religion. Fitzroy’s account is worth relating, both for its religious implications and because the man was, in his own way, a scientist.
Fitzroy was a young Royal Navy officer when he first assumed temporary command of Beagle in 1828, after the suicide of its captain. The ship had been doing survey work near the southern tip of South America when it took on board four natives of Tierra del Fuego who were taken to England to be civilized and Christianized — the hope was that they would return to their people as missionaries. In 1831 Fitzroy was reappointed to Beagle and given the task of a lengthy survey cruise; he was to chart distant waters and report on the hydrography of the areas he visited. As well as carrying back the Fuegians, Fitzroy sailed with young ne’er-do-well and amateur biologist Charles Darwin as someone with whom the captain, isolated socially from his crew, could relate on a personal level and, hopefully, share his scientific interests. It is important to note that Fitzroy on his previous voyages had observed geographical features that must have taken aeons to shape, an observation that challenged any literalist view of Creation and the Flood. As token of this, Fitzroy gave Darwin a copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geography.
The voyage was eventful, of course, for Darwin’s work but also because of the often-stormy relationship between the moody and irascible Fitzroy and his guest. Though Fitzroy during the expedition had remained convinced of the immense age of the earth and a sceptic of the account of Noah, he seems to have undergone a religious conversion shortly after his return home, possibly influenced by his recent marriage. He began to doubt the findings of Lyell and Darwin and felt guilty about his part in enabling Darwin’s work. At the famous Oxford debate in 1860 which pitted Darwin’s supporters against his religious opponents, Fitzroy “lifting an immense Bible first with both and afterwards with one hand over his head, solemnly implored the audience to believe God rather than man”. The crowd shouted him down.
But there is more to Fitzroy’s life than this sad portrayal of a man who saw the eternal verities denied and his life’s work twisted, because Fitzroy served nobly as Governor of New Zealand, urging decent treatment of the native Maori and because he was an eminent scientist with his own claim to fame. He was elected to the Royal Society (with the approval of Darwin) and pioneered research in meteorology. He invented new types of barometers to predict changes in the weather. With great industry and intelligence he arranged for systems of weather reporting by land and sea; his office made weather “forecasts” (Fitzroy invented the term) which warned ships away from sailing on dangerous days, thus saving the lives of countless sailors, and laid the foundations for today’s weather science.
Unfortunately, his good nature, which caused him to spend his entire fortune on public works, and his depressive personality led him to commit suicide. Scientists, including Darwin, raised funds to support his family.
On this date, the rebellious colonists of British North America published their manifesto, surely one of the most interesting and influential documents in history. While most readers focus on the early parts of the writing, it is instructive to read the lengthy list of abuses which the authors use to justify their uprising against their lawful king. What is even more instructive is to consider a passage that was cut from the original draught:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither … And he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
In this fascinating paragraph Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owner surrounded in Congress by other slave-owners, criticizes the British for instituting African slavery in America, and blocking attempts to suppress the slave trade, and then criticizes the British for promising freedom to those slaves who remain loyal to the crown.
I have always considered the American Revolution to be an enormous and sad mistake. Had the rebellion failed and the colonists remained under the British crown, slavery would have been abolished decades earlier and far less painfully. A mighty transatlantic anglophone empire would have existed without the curse of a written Enlightenment-engendered constitution that has caused the USA so much grief.
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think “This time”. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.
Thus wrote William Faulkner about the bloody events of July 3, 1863, when the Battle of Gettysburg was lost to the Southern cause, when thousands of rebel infantrymen were blown to bits trudging the three quarters of mile under ferocious fire toward the Union lines.
Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North was met and blunted at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by General George Meade. Most historians regard the three-days of fighting at Gettysburg as the turning point of the American Civil, the last time at which the South could realistically contemplate victory, and they look upon Pickett’s Charge as the moment the battle was decisively settled.
Lee’s orders for July 2 involved a massive frontal assault on the centre of the Union line, preceded by an artillery barrage that was to obliterate the northern guns. This plan caused dismay among the generals called upon to carry it out. James Longstreet, the corps commander, told Lee that the charge was doomed to fail: “I have been a soldier all my life. I have commanded companies, I have commanded regiments. I have commanded divisions. And I have commanded even more. But there are no fifteen thousand men in the world that can go across that ground.” Lee insisted it be carried out but Longstreet proved correct. The Confederate artillery did little to silence the northern guns and the grey-clad lines, 12,500 men stretching a mile wide, led by Generals Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble, suffered horrible casualties as they moved toward the low stone wall on Cemetery Ridge that was their target. Few made it that far. The charge evaporated into confusion and retreat.
The next day Lee began his retreat back to the South.
Unlike his fellow French Jesuit missioners in 17th-century North America, Jacques Frémin (1628-91) avoided being murdered by unfriendly natives. Born in Rheims, he joined the Jesuits in 1646 and was sent to evangelize the Mohawk, Onodaga and Cayahoga peoples, tribes not known for their pacifism. Fermin is said to have made 10,000 converts through his station on Isle la Motte, in what is now Vermont.
St Longinus of Rome
Like his more famous namesake, the soldier who pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion, Longinus of Rome was also a Roman soldier. He is said to have been one of three legionaries (the other two were Martinian and Processus) assigned to guard St Paul and Saint Peter in Rome. According to legend, Paul converted all three of them and they all suffered martyrdom together in the Neronian persecution.
Despite the imperial death sentence passed on heretic monk Martin Luther, his ideas began to spread throughout western Europe. In 1522 all the brothers of a monastery of his fellow Augustinians in Antwerp announced themselves convinced by Lutheran doctrine — some had resided for a time in Wittenberg and imbibed Lutheran doctrine from its source. The Catholic authorities arrested them and secured recantations from most of the monks, but two of them, Johan Esch and Heinrich Voes, remained obdurate, even under threat of death. On July 1, 1523 these two men were burnt alive in the public square of Brussels. Though the execution was nasty and prolonged, one of the condemned was heard to say “I feel as if extended on a bed of roses.”.
The news of these deaths inspired Martin Luther to write his first hymn, “Ein neues Lied wir heben an”; it is known in English through the 1843 version by John Messenger, “Flung to the Heedless Winds”.
Flung to the heedless winds Or on the waters cast, The martyrs’ ashes, watched, Shall gathered be at last. And from that scattered dust, Around us and abroad, Shall spring a plenteous seed Of witnesses for God. The Father hath received Their latest living breath, And vain is Satan’s boast Of victory in their death. Still, still, though dead, they speak, And, trumpet-tongued, proclaim To many a wakening land The one availing Name.
1968 Pope Paul VI issues the “Credo of the People of God”
To commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul, Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) issued the papal letter Solemni Hac Liturgia, known as “The Credo of the People of God.” It is an explication of the Roman Catholic understanding of the traditional Christian creeds. Its contents would be found largely uncontroversial by Protestants and Eastern Christians, but Articles 22-26 would cause them trouble.
One Shepherd
Recognizing also the existence, outside the organism of the Church of Christ, of numerous elements of truth and sanctification which belong to her as her own and tend to Catholic unity, and believing in the action of the Holy Spirit who stirs up in the heart of the disciples of Christ love of this unity, we entertain the hope that the Christians who are not yet in the full communion of the one only Church will one day be reunited in one flock with one only shepherd.
We believe that the Church is necessary for salvation, because Christ, who is the sole mediator and way of salvation, renders Himself present for us in His body which is the Church. But the divine design of salvation embraces all men; and those who without fault on their part do not know the Gospel of Christ and His Church, but seek God sincerely, and under the influence of grace endeavor to do His will as recognized through the promptings of their conscience, they, in a number known only to God, can obtain salvation.
Sacrifice of Calvary
We believe that the Mass, celebrated by the priest representing the person of Christ by virtue of the power received through the Sacrament of Orders, and offered by him in the name of Christ and the members of His Mystical Body, is the sacrifice of Calvary rendered sacramentally present on our altars. We believe that as the bread and wine consecrated by the Lord at the Last Supper were changed into His body and His blood which were to be offered for us on the cross, likewise the bread and wine consecrated by the priest are changed into the body and blood of Christ enthroned gloriously in heaven, and we believe that the mysterious presence of the Lord, under what continues to appear to our senses as before, is a true, real and substantial presence.
Transubstantiation
Christ cannot be thus present in this sacrament except by the change into His body of the reality itself of the bread and the change into His blood of the reality itself of the wine, leaving unchanged only the properties of the bread and wine which our senses perceive. This mysterious change is very appropriately called by the Church transubstantiation. Every theological explanation which seeks some understanding of this mystery must, in order to be in accord with Catholic faith, maintain that in the reality itself, independently of our mind, the bread and wine have ceased to exist after the Consecration, so that it is the adorable body and blood of the Lord Jesus that from then on are really before us under the sacramental species of bread and wine, as the Lord willed it, in order to give Himself to us as food and to associate us with the unity of His Mystical Body.(37)
The unique and indivisible existence of the Lord glorious in heaven is not multiplied, but is rendered present by the sacrament in the many places on earth where Mass is celebrated. And this existence remains present, after the sacrifice, in the Blessed Sacrament which is, in the tabernacle, the living heart of each of our churches. And it is our very sweet duty to honour and adore in the blessed Host which our eyes see, the Incarnate Word whom they cannot see, and who, without leaving heaven, is made present before us.
Margaret Beaufort (1441-1509) was the daughter and heiress of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Being very beautiful, as well as the heiress of great possessions, she was at the early age of fifteen years anxiously sought in marriage by two persons of high rank and influence. One was a son of the Duke of Suffolk, then chief advisor to the king; the other was Edmund, Earl of Richmond, half-brother to the reigning monarch, Henry the Sixth. Wavering between these two proposals [she was only 9 years old], Margaret, in her perplexity, requested advice from an elderly gentlewoman, her confidential friend. The matron recommended her not to consult her own inclinations, but to take an early opportunity of submitting the question to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of undecided maidens. She did so, and the saint appeared to her in a vision, dressed in great episcopal splendour, and advised her to marry Edmund. Following this advice, she became the mother of Henry Tudor, who afterwards became King Henry VII. Edmund died soon after the birth of his son, and Margaret married twice afterwards: first, Humphrey Stafford, son of the Duke of Buckingham; and, secondly, Thomas Lord Stanley, subsequently Earl of Derby. We are not told if she consulted St. Nicholas in the choice of her second and third husbands.
Margaret founded several colleges, and employed herself in acts of real charity and pure devotion not common at the period. After a useful and exemplary life, she died at the age of sixty-eight years; having just lived to see her grandson Henry VIII seated on the throne of England. She is included among the royal authors as a translator of some religious works from the French, one of which, entitled The Soul’s Perfection, was printed by Wynkyn de Worde. At the end of this work are the following verses:
‘This heavenly book, more precious than gold, Was late direct, with great humility, For godly pleasure therein to behold, Unto the right noble Margaret, as ye see, The King’s mother of excellent bounty, Harry the Seventh; that Jesu him preserve, This mighty Princess hath commanded me T’ imprint this book, her grace for to deserve.’
On June 28, 1914 a gang of teenage terrorists, set in motion by the Serbian secret police, attacked a motorcade in Sarajevo, Bosnia. After much tragicomic bungling, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were murdered by the gunfire of Gavrilo Princip, a young fanatic who sought independence for Bosnia from Austria. A little over a month later, Princip’s action would result in the start of the Great War, an act, as Pope Benedict XV lamented, of civilizational suicide. Millions upon millions would die, empires would fall, new nations would arise with the basic quarrels unsettled, leading to another global war. The consequences of the deed performed by a teenager named after the archangel Gabriel had untold consequences for Christianity.
Almost immediately the war assumed the shape of a holy conflict with all sides claiming to be on the side of God (German troops wore belt buckles proclaiming “Gott Mit Uns”) and their enemies the servants of the devil. For the Turks it was an anti-Christian jihad against the French and British empires; for American evangelist Billy Sunday the struggle was “Germany against America, hell against heaven.” Germans saw themselves as beleaguered Davids surrounded by bestial Goliaths. Kaiser Wilhelm’s court chaplain preached a sermon proclaiming “We are going into battle for our culture against the uncultured, for the free German personality bound to God against the instincts of the undisciplined masses. And God will be with our just weapons! For German faith and German piety are ultimately bound up with German faith and civilization.” (Karl Barth was among the few German theologians who was appalled by such an attitude.)Meanwhile the British portrayed the Kaiser as Antichrist leading a horde of church burners and nun rapists. On the national level church leaders, aside from Quakers and Mennonites, wholeheartedly supported their countries’ participation while in the trenches, troops were told the dead were Christian martyrs and the living were crusaders.
At the war’s end, thousands of churches had been levelled, most notably St Martin’s cathedral of Ypres which became a symbol of the conflict’s destruction of civility. Thousands of priests and ministers had been killed serving as chaplains or executed by occupying powers. The faith of many was shaken by the horror of the war and returning veterans were notable for their distaste for the churches whose Sunday parades they had been forced to attend in the trenches. The Orthodox Church was shattered by the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution. New secular messiahs were sought and found in Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini.
Dr John Dodd, a famous English preacher whose wasteful extravagance led to his forging financial documents in order to rescue himself from poverty and shame, was hanged on this day on the triangular gallows at Tyburn in London. After being cut down, his body was instantly taken away and attempts were made to revive him with a hot bath. Since hanging at this time usually meant death by strangulation instead of snapping of the neck in the drop, such efforts at revival occasionally succeeded. A 19th-century source tells us:
On the 16th August 1264, Henry III granted a pardon to a woman named Inetta de Balsham, who, having been condemned to death for harbouring thieves, hung on a gallows from nine o’clock of a Monday to sunrise of Thursday, and yet came off with life, as was testified to the king by sufficient evidence.
Dr. Plot, who quotes the original words of the pardon, surmises that it might have been a case like one he had heard of from Mr. Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, being that of a Swiss who was hung up thirteen times without effect, life being preserved by the condition of the wind-pipe, which was found to be by disease converted into bone.
Dr. Plot relates several cases of the resuscitation of women after hanging, and makes the remark that this revival of life appears to happen most frequently in the female sex. One notable case was that of a poor servant girl named Anne Green, who was condemned to death, at Oxford in 1650 for alleged child-murder, although her offence could only be so interpreted by superstition and pedantry. This poor woman, while hanging, had her legs pulled, and her breast knocked by a soldier’s musket [in order to hasten her demise]; she was afterwards trampled on, and the rope was left unslackened around her neck. Yet, when in the hands of the doctors for dissection, she gave symptoms of life, and in fourteen hours was so far well as to be able to speak. Eager inquiries were made as to her sensations from the moment of suspension; but she remembered nothing she came back to life like one awakening out of a deep sleep. This poor woman obtained a pardon, was afterwards married, and had three children.
A second female malefactor, the servant of a Mrs. Cope, at Oxford, was hanged there in 1658, and kept suspended an unusually long time, to make sure of the extinction of life; after which, being cut down, her body was allowed to fall to the ground with a violence which might have been sufficient to kill many unhanged persons. Yet she revived. In this case the authorities insisted on fulfilling their imperfect duty next day. Plot gives a third case, that of Marjory Mausole, of Arley, in Staffordshire, without informing us of its date or any other circumstances.
On the 2nd of September 1721, a poor woman named Margaret Dickson, married, but separated from her husband, was hanged at Edinburgh for the crime of concealing pregnancy in the case of a dead child. After suspension, the body was inclosed in a coffin at the gallows’ foot, and carried off in a cart by her relatives, to be interred in her parish churchyard at Musselburgh, six miles off. Some surgeon apprentices rudely stopped the cart before it left town, and broke down part of the cooms, or sloping roof of the coffin,—thus undesignedly letting in air. The subsequent jolting of the vehicle restored animation before it had got above two miles from the city, and Maggy was carried home a living woman, though faint and hardly conscious. Her neighbours flocked around her in wonder; a minister came to pray over her; and her husband, relenting under a renewed affection, took her home again. She lived for many years after, had several more children creditably born, and used to be pointed out in the streets of Edinburgh, where she cried salt, as Half-Hanged Maggy Dickson.
The instances of men reviving after hanging are scarcely less numerous than those of females. In 1705, a housebreaker named Smith being hung up at Tyburn, a reprieve came after he had been suspended for a quarter of an hour. He was taken down, bled, and revived. One William Duell, duly hanged in London in 1740, and taken to the Surgeons’ Hall to be anatomized, came to life again, and was transported. At Cork a man was hanged in January 1767 for a street robbery, and immediately after carried to a place appointed, where a surgeon made an incision in his windpipe, and in about six hours recovered him. The almost incredible fact is added, that the fellow had the hardihood to attend the theatre the same evening. William Brodie, executed in Edinburgh, October 1788, for robbing the excise-office, had similar arrangements made for his recovery. It was found, however, that he had had a greater fall than he bargained for with the hangman, and thus the design was frustrated.
On the 3rd of October 1696, a man named Richard Johnson was hanged at Shrewsbury, He had previously, on a hypocritical pretence, obtained a promise from the under-sheriff that his body should be laid in his coffin without being stripped. He hung half an hour, and still showed signs of life, when a man went up to the scaffold to see what was wrong with him. On a hasty examination, it was found that the culprit had wreathed cords round and under his body, connected with a pair of hooks at his neck, by which the usual effect of the rope was prevented, the whole of this apparatus being adroitly concealed under a double shirt and a flowing periwig. On the trick being discovered, he was taken down, and immediately hanged in an effectual manner.
