Christmas Every Day

1929 Birth of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The son of a prominent Atlanta, Georgia pastor, King (1929-68)  attended segregated public schools and went on to study theology, receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 1955. As a pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama and a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he took a leadership role in the famous bus boycott provoked by the actions of Rosa Parks. During the struggle, King was arrested and his home was bombed but victory was eventually won; blacks and whites would henceforth ride the buses as equals.

In 1957 King was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization pressing for increased civil rights through an application of religious principles, especially nonviolent protest. He grew in fame and moral stature as he led marches in Selma, Alabama where young black people encountered the firehoses and police dogs; in Birmingham he was arrested, which inspired his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In the March on Washington, he delivered his  “l Have a Dream” speech to a quarter-million people. In 1964, at the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., became the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.

With the passage of the landmark civil rights bills of the mid-1960s, King turned his attention to protesting American involvement in the Vietnamese civil war and economic inequality. These stands lost King a good deal of white support while more radical black leaders, rejecting non-violence, seemed to be gaining in popularity amongst African American youth. In April 1968 he appeared in Memphis Tennessee to lend his support to a strike by garbage workers. His speech on April 3 was eerily prophetic:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

The next day, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, he was assassinated.

1753 Death of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne

Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Anglo-Irish pilosopher and churchman, best known for his 1710 work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Understanding in which he argued that nothing existed unless it was perceived. His later years were spent, as Chambers’ Book of Days explains, in touting the virtues of pine tar.

Berkeley was a poet, as well as a mathematician and philosopher; and his mind was not only well stored with professional and philosophical learning, but with information upon trade, agriculture, and the common arts of life.  Having received benefit from the use of tar-water, when ill of the colic, he published a work on the Virtues of Tar-water, on which he said he had bestowed more pains than on any other of his productions. His last work, published but a few mouths before his death, was Further Thoughts on Tar-water; and it shows his enthusiastic character, that, when accused of fancying he had discovered a panacea in tar-water, he replied, that to speak out, he freely owns he suspects tar-water is a panacea.’ Walpole has taken the trouble to preserve, from the newspapers of the day, the following epigram on Berkeley’s tar-water:

Who dare deride what pious Cloyne has done?
The Church shall rise and vindicate her son;
She tells is all her bishops shepards are,
And Shepherds heal their rotten sheep with tar’

In a letter written by Mr. John Whishaw, solicitor, May 25^th, 1744, we find this account of Berkeley’s panacea: 

“The Bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland, has published a book, of two shillings price, upon the excellencies of tar-water, which is to keep ye bloud in due order, and a great remedy in many cases. His way of making it is to put, I think a gallon of water to a quart of tar, and after stirring it together. to let it stand forty-eight hours, and then pour off the clear and drink a glass of about half a pint in ye mornn, and as much at five in ye afternoon. So it’s become common to call for a glass of tar-water in a coffee-house, as a dish of tea or coffee.’

1645

The death of an archbishop.

William Laud (1573-1645) was an English churchman during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, a time when Anglicanism was being defined and when ecclesiastical issues were literally matters of life and death.

Under Elizabeth the Church of England sought a religious via media, with a Protestant theology mated with the rule of bishops and an ornate ceremonial. It was opposed by Catholics who sought a return to Rome and by Puritans who wished to purge the “popish dregs” of ceremony and episcopacy. In 1605 the attempt by Catholic conspirators to murder the entire royal family, political class and church leadership in the Gunpowder Plot convinced most Englishmen that Catholicism meant foreign tyranny and that Protestantism meant patriotism.

The latter belief became problematic when King Charles I married a Catholic French princess and covertly allowed Catholic clergy at court. The problem was exacerbated when Charles nominated William Laud to be, first, Bishop of London (1628) and then Archbishop of Canterbury (1633). Through church courts, Laud enforced a novel theology on Anglicanism, his version of Arminianism which challenged some long-held doctrines and imposed a very Catholic-looking ceremonial, and drove out Puritan leaning preachers and professors. His persecution of the dissident writer William Prynne, who was sentenced to judicial mutilation and imprisonment, was very unpopular. Prynne had been branded on the forehead with the letters “SL”, meaning “seditious libel” but which the victim claimed really represented “Stigmata Laudis” — “the marks of Laud”. By 1640 anger between the royal party and large sections of public and political opinion were at a boiling point.

After years of trying to rule on his own Charles was obliged to call Parliament which called for the arrests of the king’s chief advisors, Laud and William Wentworth. Wentworth went to the block in 1641 but Laud’s trial was delayed. He was accused of bribery, attempting to impose a tyranny, sponsoring Catholic influence, undermining Parliament and having “treacherously endeavoured to subvert the Fundamental Laws of this Realm; and to that end hath in like manner endeavoured to advance the Power of the Council-Table, the Canons of the Church, and the King’s Prerogative, above the Laws and Statutes of the Realm”. Laud was executed on this day in 1645.

Laud was exactly the wrong man for the high positions he held at the time he was appointed to them; aggressive and intolerant, he helped create the crisis that led to the English Civil War and the execution of himself and the king he served.

It is St Fillan’s Day. Fillan was an 8th-century Scottish saint,  known for his piety and good works. He spent a considerable part of his holy life at a monastery which he built in Pittenweem. While engaged here in transcribing the Scriptures, his left hand sent forth sufficient light to enable him, at night, to continue his work without a lamp. For the sake of seclusion, he finally retired to a wild and lonely vale, called from him Strathfillan, in Perthshire, where he died, and where his name is still attached to the ruins of a chapel, to a pool, and a bed of rock.

The uses to which the locale was put tell us much about the treatment of mental illness in Medieval Scotland: At Strathfillan, there is a deep pool, called the Holy Pool, where, in olden times, they were wont to dip insane people. The ceremony was performed after sunset on the first day of the quarter, and before sunrise next morning. The dipped persons were instructed to take three stones from the bottom of the pool, and, walking three times round each of three cairns on the bank, throw a stone into each. They were next conveyed to the ruins of St. Fillan’s chapel; and in a corner called St. Fillan’s bed, they were laid on their back, and left tied all night. If next morning they were found loose, the cure was deemed perfect, and thanks returned to the saint. The pool was visited  in the nineteenth century, not by parishioners, who had no faith in its virtue, but by people from other and distant places.

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.

In 1162 Henry II sought to bring the English Church under strict royal control by appointing to the archbishopric of Canterbury his chancellor and good friend, Thomas Becket. But in raising Becket to the primacy, Henry had misjudged his man. As chancellor, Becket had been a devoted royal servant, but as archbishop of Canterbury he became a fervent defender of ecclesiastical independence and an implacable enemy of the king. Henry and Becket became locked in a furious quarrel over the issue of royal control of the English Church. In 1164 Henry issued a list of pro-royal provisions relating to Church-state relations known as the “Constitutions of Clarendon,” which, among other things, prohibited appeals to Rome without royal license and established a degree of royal control over the Church courts. Henry maintained that the Constitutions of Clarendon represented ancient custom; Becket regarded them as unacceptable infringements of the freedom of the Church.

At the heart of the quarrel was the issue of whether churchmen accused of crimes should be subject to royal jurisdiction after being found guilty and punished by Church courts. The king complained that “criminous clerks” were often given absurdly light sentences by the ecclesiastical tribunals. A murderer, for example, might simply be banished from the priesthood (“defrocked”) and released, whereas in the royal courts the penalty was execution or mutilation. The Constitutions of Clarendon provided that once a cleric was tried, convicted, and defrocked by an ecclesiastical court, the Church should no longer prevent his being brought to a royal court for further punishment. Becket replied that nobody ought to be put in double jeopardy. In essence, Henry was challenging the competence of an agency of the international Church, whereas Becket, as primate of England, felt bound to defend the ecclesiastical system of justice and the privileges of churchmen. Two worlds were in collision.

Henry turned on his archbishop, accusing him of various crimes against the kingdom. And Becket, insisting that an archbishop cannot be judged by a king but only by the pope, fled England to seek papal support. Pope Alexander III, who was in the midst of his struggle with Frederick Barbarossa, could not afford to alienate Henry; yet neither could he turn against such an ardent ecclesiastical champion as Becket. The great lawyer-pope was forced to equivocate—to encourage Becket without breaking with Henry—and Becket remained in exile for the next six years. At length, in 1170, the king and his archbishop agreed to a truce. Most of the outstanding issues between them remained unsettled, but Henry permitted Becket to return to England and resume the archbishopric. At once, however, the two antagonists had another falling out. Becket excommunicated a number of Henry’s supporters; the king flew into a rage, and four enthusiastically loyal but dim-witted barons of the royal household dashed to Canterbury Cathedral, intimidated Becket and his monks, and then murdered him as he was saying Mass.

This dramatic atrocity made a deep impact on the age. Becket was regarded as a martyr; miracles were alleged to have occurred at his tomb, and he was quickly canonized. For the remainder of the Middle Ages, Canterbury was a major pilgrimage center, and the cult of St. Thomas enjoyed immense popularity. Henry, who had not ordered the killing but whose anger had prompted it, suffered acute embarrassment. He was obliged to do penance by walking barefoot through the streets of Canterbury and submitting to a flogging by the Canterbury monks (who seem to have enjoyed the episode immensely).