Christmas Every Day

590

Gregory the Great is elected pope.

It would be hard to name a more influential pope of the early Middle Ages than St. Gregory I (540-604), called the Great. (Supporters of the claim of Leo I, also the Great and also a saint, may send their arguments on a postcard to St Margaret’s Church, Winnipeg.) Born into a wealthy Roman family with a pope and many high-ranking officials on his family tree, he was superbly educated in the liberal arts and entered at an early age into political life, becoming Prefect of Rome (the highest rank in the city) by his early 30s. He took office at a miserable time in the history of Rome with Italy ravaged by the barbarian Lombards and still recovering from the depopulation and chaos caused by the Byzantine attempt at reconquest and the plague.

On the death of his father he converted his family villa into a monastery and became a monk, soon rising in influence in the Church. In 579 he was chosen by the pope to lead an embassy to the emperor in Constantinople to whom Rome still owed allegiance. His attempt to convince the emperor to send troops to Italy to stop the Lombard advance was fruitless.

In 590, much against his will, he was elected Pope to replace Pelagius II who died of the plague. He took on this task with great energy and succeeded by the time of his death 14 years later in elevating the status and reach of the Roman papacy. For the previous century the bishops of Rome had had little positive influence on the lands of the western empire which had been lost to the Germanic invaders. Britain had lost contact with civilization for almost a century; Spain was dominated by Arian heretics; and the Church in Gaul was in the hands of the Frankish landowners who had little thought for evangelism. Under Gregory the papacy reached out to assert the international leadership of the Bishop of Rome once more. One of his great achievements was sending the mission of Augustine, a monk from his own monastery, to England to spread Christianity to the German tribes there. He reformed the liturgy and encouraged the music we now call Gregorian chant. He reformed the management of church lands which came to provide food and revenue for the poor of Rome. His book Pastoral Care was translated by Alfred the Great into English and was one of the civilizing books every church had to have a copy of.

1516

Erasmus dedicates his revised version of the New Testament to Pope Leo X.

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) was the leading public intellectual of his time, a humanist who used new attitudes and techniques to critique the Christian Church of the early modern period. Born the illegitimate son of a Catholic priest, he became a priest himself but spent his life pursuing humanistic studies and being supported by a series of patrons of the new learning. He travelled widely and became something of a literary celebrity, winning fame for his works in Latin such as Utopia and Praise of Folly, which was critical of Church teaching on purgatory and indulgences.

Influenced by John Colet’s historical approach to Scripture, Erasmus applied his knowledge of Greek and Latin to produce a revised version of the New Testament, amending numerous errors in the Vulgate, the 1,000-year-old Latin version. Though his translation work had papal approval, Erasmus’s Greek New Testament was a spur to many vernacular versions including Luther’s highly influential German version.

Erasmus had enemies on both sides of the religious wars that soon erupted. He and Luther disagreed on the possibility of free will and the nature of the Eucharist while later popes placed his works on The Index of Prohibited Books.

314

Accession of Pope Sylvester I.

Few popes could have reigned at a more important time in the history of the Church. It was during his pontificate that the emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity and that religion began to openly flourish in the Roman empire. This was also the time when the first great churches were erected, especially St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which endured for over 1,000 years before it was levelled to make way for the neo-classical building that now exists on that site.

Sylvester may be even more important for the legends that surrounded him after his death than anything he accomplished in life. Early in the sixth century stories began to be written about an especially close relationship between Sylvester and Constantine, stories in which the emperor, out of gratitude for being cured of leprosy, is said to have elevated the bishop of Rome above all other church figures and submitted himself to him. By the 700s this legend took the form of one of the great forgeries of all time, the Donation of Constantine, which claimed that Constantine, before moving east to his new capital in Constantinople, had granted the papacy sovereignty over the western empire. This document was used by later popes in their political quarrels with emperors and kings before being exposed as fake in the 1400s by Lorenzo Valla.

1550

The birth of Henri, Duc de Guise.

Guise was the leader of the ultra-Catholic faction during that phase of the French Religious Wars known as The War of the Three Henrys, in which Guise battled the centrist monarch Henri III and the Protestant leader Henri de Navarre. Guise, who had urged the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Huguenots, was assassinated by Henri III in 1588.

1561

Death of Menno Simons.

Simons (1496-1561) was a Dutch Catholic priest who converted to Anabaptism in 1536 after the death of his brother Pieter who had been a follower of the radical Münsterites. Simons rejected the violent path that his brother and other Anabaptists had taken, preaching a pacifist message of separation from the world and adult believer baptism. Many Anabaptist denominations sprang up following his teachings.

1521

The Diet of Worms opens.

Th religious turmoil begun by Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses in 1517 reached a climax when the German parliament (Diet) met in the town of Worms. Luther’s defenders had demanded that he be tried only in a German setting and so he was summoned to meet the emperor Charles V and representatives of the Church and nation. His defiance of these authorities would result in his outlawing and the beginnings of a separate religious movement that later in the decade would come to be known as Protestantism.

1547

Henry VIII dies.

The death of the king who had pulled the Church of England from obedience to the pope meant the succession of young Edward VI who, along with his closest advisers, were committed to a deeper reformation of that church along Protestant lines. Within six years England will have a new theology, married clergy, ceremonies in English, and an English prayer book but the population will remain split between Catholic supporters, those content with the new order, and those who wanted further reform. These divisions will continue for decades more.

1962

The birth of a prosperity preacher.

Few clergymen have been as aptly named as Creflo Dollar, a clergyman who ended up boasting the ownership of two Rolls-Royce automobiles, multiple multi-million dollar residences and a private jet. Born in Georgia, he began his ministry in 1986 in a school auditorium with only 8 people in the congregation. Preaching the message that God wishes his followers to be be wealthy and healthy, Creflo succeeded in creating a church of 30,000 members, satellite churches across America and an international organization, World Changers Church. His television program is broadcast around the globe. Dollar’s wife Taffi is co-pastor and is developing an outreach to women in the sex trade.

1077

In one of the most famous confrontations in medieval history Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV kneels before Pope Gregory VII in the snow at Canossa. A quarrel over whether secular powers could appoint church leaders had resulted in open war between emperor and pope. Gregory excommunicated Henry and Henry nominated a rival pope. The excommunication cut away much of Henry’s support and he was forced at Canossa to beg for forgiveness and reinstatement into the Church. This the pope granted but soon Henry rebelled again. Gregory would eventually be driven from Rome. His last words were “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.”

1366

Death of Henry Suso (b. 1295) was a Dominican monk and mystic. For a period in his life he submitted himself to rigorous mortification of the flesh, wearing underwear studded with brass nails and sleeping on a cross of protruding needles. He later abandoned these as a distraction. Lovers of Christmas carols will know him as the composer of “In Dulci Jubilo“, translated as “Good Christian Men Rejoice”. Suso learned the tune from a dream in which angels visited him and led him in a round dance.

1533

Henry VIII secretly marries Anne Boleyn. Henry had for years sought to rid himself of his barren wife Katherine of Aragon and marry a woman who could provide him with a legitimate male heir. When his mistress Anne Boleyn became pregnant, it forced Henry’s hand. He wed her, though his union with Katherine had not been ended. This was regularized later by his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who ruled that the marriage to Katherine was invalid and the Boleyn marriage lawful. The ensuing legal and religious brouhaha would result in the pulling out of the Church of England from obedience to the pope and the eventual formation of the Anglican Church.

1944

Florence Li Tim-Oi becomes the world’s first female Anglican priest. The Japanese invasion of China had created a crisis for Christians and Christian missionaries in China. Because it was impossible to get a male priest to minister to the Anglicans of Portuguese colony of Macau on the coast of China, Bishop Ronald Hall of Hong Kong ordained Florence Li Tim-Oi. Her ordination was controversial; it would be decades before any church in the Anglican communion would ordain women and her appointment was opposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury when he learned of it. In 1971, however, she was recognized as an Anglican priest. Today The Li Tim-Oi Foundation exists to empower Christian women as agents of change. It provides grants to suitable candidates in the Two-Thirds World to train for Christian mission and ministry. She died in Toronto in 1982.