Christmas Every Day

1940

The destruction of Coventry Cathedral.

In the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe, the German airforce, began the Battle of Britain, wave after wave of attacks designed to eliminate the Royal Air Force, as a necessary prelude to a sea-borne invasion of England. By the autumn of that year the Germans had decided that they had failed in their plans and abandoned the notion of a cross-Channel incursion. The Luftwaffe was directed instead to concentrate on bombing British cities to destroy their enemy’s industrial capacity: this made Coventry, with its many armament plants, a logical target.

On the night of November 14 the Germans launched Operation Moonlight Sonata, an attack of 515 bombers dropping 500 tonnes of high explosive and 36,000 incendiary devices. Two-thirds of the city’s factories were hit, at least 500 people were killed, thousands were rendered homeless and St Michael’s Cathedral, a tall Gothic building dating from the 1300s was almost entirely obliterated. The lesson the British earned from this was that such bombing of urban areas could be effective and it justified the massive retaliation they and the American airforce would deal out to German cities in the coming years.

In the post-war years it was suggested that Winston Churchill had been alerted to the raid on Coventry by decoded Enigma signals but chose to give no warning to the city lest the Germans realized the secrecy of their code machines had been compromised. This seems not to have been the case and the British had no warning of the attacks to come.

The grand Gothic building was never rebuilt and a new modern edifice was erected on the spot. This sculpture of St Michael overcoming the Devil is on the outside of the new cathedral.

1554

The English Church returns to Roman Catholicism. The reign of Henry VIII (d. 1547) had seen the Church of England leave the obedience of Rome, though retaining most Catholic doctrine. His young son Edward VI (r. 1547-53) had decreed a full-blown Protestant church with a new Prayer Book, vernacular services and married clergy. His death brought to the throne his half-sister Mary I who had clung to her Catholicism and who was determined to see her church return to Rome. Because the Henrician reformation had distributed church lands to the nobility, Mary had to proceed carefully. In November 1554, with her marriage to a Spanish Catholic prince and the pope’s agreement that the return of church lands was not necessary, her Parliament passed the Second Act of Repeal. The House of Lords and the House of Commons declared themselves “very sorry for the schism and disobedience committed in this realm . . . against the See Apostolic” and they sought “as children repentant to be received into the bosom and unity of Christ’s Church.” All the antipapal legislation passed since 1529 was repealed and the old treason and heresy laws were revived. Within a few months the Marian government had started burning stubborn Protestants and earning the queen her sobriquet of “Bloody” Mary. Historians have argued ever since whether Roman Catholicism could have ever been successfully reimplanted into the English character had the queen lived longer than she did (d. 1558). In any event the succession of her half-sister Elizabeth would lead to a return to Protestantism and an Anglican Church.

Feast Day of St Martin of Tours

St Martin, born c. 316, was a Christian soldier in the army of the Roman Empire, known for his charity. He is famous for having cut his military cloak in half to share with a freezing beggar. After leaving the army he became a hermit in Gaul but was compelled by townsfolk in Tours to become the local bishop. He evangelized widely and established a monastery where monks would later develop the handwriting known as Carolingian miniscule, a wonderfully readable improvement on earlier hands. St Martin’s burial site drew thousands of pilgrims and became a rich shrine, the target of a Muslim raid from Spain in 732. Because of his cloak, he is the patron saint of tailors; because cackling geese gave him away when he attempted to hide from the summons to be a bishop, goose is traditionally eaten on his feast. His cult was always favoured by the French monarchy and so he is also a patron of France.

1918

The end of World War I, the worst armed conflict in human history to that time. Even in its early stages there were strong religious motivations for the war with each side claiming divine sanction. German equipment carried the motto “Gott Mit Uns”; the Turkish emperor in his role as Caliph declared the war a jihad and called on Muslims in the French, British and Russian empires to rise up against their rulers; Russians declared that the German Kaiser was the Antichrist; evangelist Billy Sunday characterized the war as “Germany against America, hell against heaven.” Millions of troops in every army believed themselves to be crusaders of a sort. The war was conducted savagely, destroying countless churches – the ruin of the great Gothic cathedral in Ypres became a symbol of the horror of the Western Front. It did not spare the noncombatant; France alone lost 5,000 military chaplains in the fighting; Belgian and Russian nuns were raped; Cossacks pillaged villages on the Eastern Front; Armenian Christians suffered a genocide at the hands of the Turkish army. Religions seemed capable of supporting the violence but not restraining it. The religious consequences of the war were profound. It led to the Russian Revolution which gutted the Orthodox Church and instituted an atheist regime; the defeat of the Ottoman Empire led to the destruction of the Caliphate; hideous new secular faiths such as fascism and Bolshevism replaced Christianity in the hearts of many disillusioned veterans.

1871

An expedition led by journalist Henry Stanley discovers the long-lost missionary David Livingstone. Livingstone had gone as an evangelist to Africa in the 1850s and though he was unsuccessful at converting the native inhabitants his reports back to Britain were widely-read. His stories of his endless travels and the evils of the Arab slave trade made him a hero in the English-speaking world. He disappeared from sight in 1866, supposedly searching for the headwaters of the Nile. When nothing had been heard from him for years the New York Herald sent Stanley to find him. Stanley’s own expedition into the interior was perilous but he eventually reached the missionary in what is now Tanzania. His first words to his quarry became famous: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley went on to a life of continuous adventure, eventually discovering the sources of the Nile and winning a knighthood; Livingstone died of malaria in 1873 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

680

The Sixth Ecumenical Council (or the Third Council of Constantinople) opens with representatives from eastern and western churches debating the problem of Christ’s nature. Many of the Christian lands recently conquered by Islamic armies held to Monophysitism, a belief that Christ possessed a single divine nature. This had been declared a heresy in Rome and Constantinople and compromise positions had tried to bridge the gap: monothelitism (Christ had but a single will) and monoenergism (Christ had but one energy.) The Council dismissed those attempts and ruled that Christ possessed two energies and two wills but that the human will was “in subjection to his divine and all-powerful will.”

1811

He cured disease, saw the future, sundered curses, instilled visions, and passed into other realms. He felt the presence of witches and other agents of evil spirits hiding among the people. His powers were earthly signs of his profound connection to the divine. His followers stretched from the Appalachian foothills to the source of the Mississippi, and they thought he could change the world. (The Gods of Prophetstown, Adam Jortner)

Native tribes under Tenkswatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, are defeated by an American force at the Battle of Tippecanoe. The Prophet had tried to revitalize native spirituality as a way of uniting tribes against the expansion of the United States into the interior of the continent but the defeat at Tippecanoe discredited him.

1917

Russian Bolsheviks launch their revolution that would bring down the fledgling democracy formed earlier in the year. The resulting civil war and seventy years of Communist rule brought oppression and terror to Russian Christianity. The Soviet government was avowedly atheist and supported an anti-religious campaign led by the League of the Militant Godless. Thousands of priests and monks of the Orthodox Church were murdered; tens of thousands more were exiled to the gulags. Similar persecutions were carried out against Protestant denominations and Islamic clerics. Of this campaign Vladimir Lenin said, “The bigger the number of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeois we manage to shoot in the process, the better.”

On this date the Anglican Communion honours the memory of William Temple (1881-1944), Archbishop of Canterbury.

The son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple studied the classics at Oxford and began his career as a philosophy teacher before turning toward a life as a clergyman. Recognized now as one of the pillars of Anglican theological thinking, Temple was, at first, denied admission to studies for the priesthood because he confessed that his belief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were shaky. He rose quickly in the clerical ranks, becoming first Bishop of Manchester, then Archbishop of York by 1929. He had a glowing reputation as a philosopher and as a proponent of Jewish-Christian reconciliation. Temple’s thinking focussed on the creation of a just social order and he was sympathetic to working-class movements.

Temple was named Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 when Britain was engaged in the Second World War. He supported the bombing campaign of the RAF directed against German cities but was also in favour of a negotiated peace rather than the unconditional surrender which the Allies were demanding. Temple died in 1944, the last Archbishop of Canterbury to die in office.

A man so broad, to some he seem’d to be
Not one, but all Mankind in Effigy.
Who, brisk in Term, a Whirlwind in the Long,
Did everything by turns, and nothing wrong.
Bill’d at each Lecture-Hall from Thames to Tyne,
As Thinker, Usher, Statesman, or Divine.