Christmas Every Day

2009

Richard John Neuhaus dies.

Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) was in his time a Canadian, an American, a liberal civil rights advocate, Lutheran priest, Catholic priest, magazine editor, conservative presidential advisor, and fierce defender of the role of religion in public life.

Born in Pembroke, Ontario, he moved with his family to the United States where he became, like his father, a Lutheran pastor. In the 1960s he became an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam and marched with Martin Luther King in demanding greater rights for racial minorities. Neuhaus’s life took a different direction after the 1973 “Roe v Wade” Supreme Court decision on abortion; growing more conservative he sought to create a united voice for Christianity in social and political matters. He helped found the journal  First Things, where Protestant, Catholic and Jewish thinkers could “advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society” and wrote or edited influential books such as The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, Guaranteeing the Good Life: Medicine and the Return of Eugenics and American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile. With Chuck Colson he produced Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission. In 1990 he joined the Roman Catholic Church and in the next year he was ordained into the priesthood. Few have done as much to bring religious thinking to bear in the public square.

On the question of absolute truth and religious tolerance he proposed “Neuhaus’s Law”, which states, “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”

1534

Radical Anabaptists enter Münster.

Though the Protestant Reformation caused division and violence throughout Germany there were cities where an uneasy truce between Lutherans and Catholics was maintained, often because neither side was a sufficiently numerous to oppress the other. One such city was Münster in Westphalia, nominally under the rule of a Catholic prince-bishop but so evenly divided between factions that the city developed a reputation for religious tolerance. Seeking that freedom from persecution, in January 1534 large groups of Anabaptists began migrating to the city, lured by the promise that this was the “New Jerusalem”. Making common cause with many local Lutherans the Anabaptists soon gained control of the city, driving Catholic inhabitants out and demanding that adult baptism become compulsory. A Dutch  baker named Jan Matthys assumed leadership, preaching a message of Christian communism and the expectation of the End of Time; Münster had become the centre of a radical form of Protestantism that called on the people of Germany and the Netherlands to come to their aid to break the siege that the expelled bishop had surrounded the city with.

On Easter Sunday 1534 Matthys led an ill-advised sortie against the bishop’s troops which resulted in his death. Jan of Leiden, a tailor, took over the city, proclaiming himself king, the successor of David, with the former mayor Bernard Knipperdolling as his sword-bearer and executioner. Polygamy was the order of the day with Jan taking sixteen wives and murdering one who refused to wed him. Though all goods were to be held in common, the inhabitants of the city starved while Jan sat on a gold throne and his circle dined well. Finally, the gates of Münster were opened by a desperate Anabaptist and the army of the bishop poured in, intent on loot and massacre. Leiden and Knipperdolling were tortured and hoisted up in steel cages on the town’s highest church steeple where their remains were visible for centuries as a lesson against radical excesses.

1521

With the papal bull Decet Romanorum Pontificem (“It Pleases the Roman Pontiff”), Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther.

“Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it”. So said Giovanni de’ Medici (1475-1521) on his election to the papacy as Leo X in 1513. A great patron of the arts, he was a bumbler in his dealings with the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. He failed to prevent Luther from spreading his ideas throughout Germany and northern Europe despite condemning his writings in 1520 and excommunicating him in 1521.

1638

The forces of the Japanese shogun defeat Christian peasant fighters during the Shimabara Rebellion. Provoked by oppressive rule, heavy taxation and anti-Christian legislation, peasants and masterless samurai of Kyushu rose up against their overlords. They will eventually be wiped out and the shogunate will enact harsher anti-foreigner and anti-Christian rules, resulting in an almost total isolation of Japan for centuries. A statue of the rebel leader Amakusa Shiro stands on the grounds of Shimabara Castle today.

1892

Birth of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. As a member of the Inklings literary club, he was influential in the conversion of C.S. Lewis to Christianity.

On this day the Anglican Church in Canada honours the contributions of John West, missionary to Rupertsland. West (1778-1845) was an English priest, educated at Oxford who was persuaded in his 40s to undertake evangelism in the Canadian West. This was an area that had seen violence between settlers, natives and Métis, amidst the great competition between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company for control of the fur trade. Relations between the races were not always happy and there was resentment among various ethnic groups in among the settlers and traders. West arrived in the Red River Colony October 1820, sent by an agreement between the Church Missionary Society and the Hudson’s Bay Company, partly to minister to the unchurched Europeans and partly to work with indigenous tribes. He thus became the first Anglican priest in western Canada.

John West was accompanied by two native boys whom he intended to bring up in the Christian faith; he had a vision that education of the young was the way to reach the hearts of the pagan aboriginals. To that end he set up the first residential school for native children in the West, teaching not only the Christian religion but also agricultural techniques and domestic sciences. One of the boys, Henry Budd, an orphaned Cree, went on to become the first native Anglican priest.

West also brought the first organized Protestant worship to that part of the continent, preaching farther into the interior and to the north. He was not willing to tolerate the long-standing practice of traders and settlers contracting irregular marital relations with native women and demanded that these marriages à la façon du pays be regularized; he also held forth against drunkenness and failure to observe the Sabbath. He built the first church on the site of what is now St John’s Cathedral, though his preaching was found wanting by one parishioner who said “he unfortunately attempts to preach extempore from Notes, for which he has not the Capacity, his discourses being unconnected and ill-delivered. He likewise Mistakes his Point, fancying that by touching severely and pointedly on the Weaknesses of People he will produce Repentance.”

After three years he left the Red River settlement never to return; his uncompromising nature and meddling in colonial politics had undermined his position. Nevertheless, he laid a useful foundation for his successors.

1384

The death of John Wyclif. John Wyclif (or Wycliffe) was an English priest born c. 1320, a profound critic of the 14th-century Church and the leader of a heresy that came to be known as Lollardy.

The Catholic Church was languishing in one of its worst ebbs during the 1300s. The papacy was a puppet of the French monarchy and had moved from Rome to Avignon in what was known as the Babylonian Captivity. The popes could not protect the Templar Knights from the depredations of the French kings; they quarrelled with the popular Franciscan order; they could do nothing to halt the ravages of the Hundred Years War; and were helpless in the face of natural disasters such as the onset of the Little Ice Age and the Black Death. The low regard in which the Church was held sank to even further depths when rival popes multiplied in the Western Schism, producing two, three and even four claimants to the Throne of St Peter. Out of this morass rose a number of heresies, the most of these being led by Wyclif.

As an Oxford priest and doctor of theology, Wyclif developed a powerful list of indictments against the Church as he saw it. He denied the doctrine of transubstantiation; claimed the true church was not the contemporary Catholic Church but an invisible body of believers; asserted a strong view of predestination; demanded scripture in the common language; criticized the wealth of the clergy; denied the power of excommunication; called for the abolition of the monastic orders; and, worst of all, advanced a novel theory of dominion, claiming that those in a state of sin could not be authentic rulers — thus if priests were bad men and not in the state of grace they could not rightfully possess spiritual lordship and laymen may justly deprive them of their property.

The Church could not sit still when Wyclif stated that the true church was not the visible institution but the “totality of those who are predestinate”, dead, alive or yet to be born. The pope then was not the head of the true church. At best he headed only the western European branch of the church on earth. At worst a pope who was not predestined might not even be a member of the true church. To the English government, Wyclif’s words were a potential weapon against proud prelates and so the priest was protected from Church prosecution while alive. The Council of Constance in 1415 condemned the Lollard heresy and the version of it that had spread into the Czech lands where it had been taken up by Jan Hus (or John Huss). Hus was burnt at the stake while Wyclif’s remains were dug up, burnt and thrown into a river.

Wycliff has rightly been called the “morning star of the Reformation” and though Lollardy was forced underground in England, most of Wyclif’s ideas re-emerged triumphantly in the 16th century.