Christmas Every Day

1937

“Mitt brennender Sorge”

It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action in the midst of a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message and the Gospel of Christ and God’s Kingdom.

In 1933, after years of debate between the German Catholic Church and state, the Vatican and the new Nazi government signed a pact, or Reichskonkordat. In return for withdrawing support from German Catholic political parties or interfering in politics, the Catholic Church was guaranteed rights for their members. Many of the Germany clergy felt there was little sense in trusting Hitler but that this was the best deal they could hope for in the new political reality. One cardinal said, “With the concordat we are hanged, without the concordat we are hanged, drawn and quartered.”

The Nazis ignored the pact when it suited them and soon began eroding Catholic religious institutions, especially regarding the education of children and the existence of lay organizations. In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued a papal letter of protest called “Mitt brennender Sorge” (“With burning anxiety”), written, not in the customary Latin, but in German, meant to be delivered in all Catholic churches in the country. It claimed that the state had violated the terms of the concordat and was leading the people astray. The letter set the issue in stark terms and drew clear conclusions about the evil of Nazi religious ideology:

Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who “Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly” (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

 Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

In the next year Pius XI spoke out more clearly on the German treatment of Jews in response to the attacks of Kristallnacht:

 No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites.

The full text of the English translation is here http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge.html

2000

The pope apologizes

Pope St John Paul Paul II (1920-2005) made it a hallmark of his pontificate to apologize for sins committed by Christians  over the centuries. Among the subjects of his regrets were:

• The conquistadors’ behaviour in Latin America
• The judicial treatment of Galileo
• The sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204
• Christian involvement in the African slave trade
• Failure to do enough to prevent the Jewish Holocaust
• The burning of Jan Hus by the Council of Constance in 1415

On this date in 2000 John Paul gave a homily at the Mass for Pardon in the Vatican during which he implored God’s forgiveness for the faults of all believers.

“We are asking pardon for the divisions among Christians, for the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth, and for attitudes of mistrust and hostility assumed toward followers of other religions.”

Though no specific groups were named by the pope, cardinals speaking later in the service singled out Jews, gypsies, women and marginalized ethnic groups.

1765

Jean Calas is vindicated

In October 1761, Marc-Antoine Calas was found dead on the floor of his family home. At first, his parents claimed that the man had been murdered but then changed their story to say that they had found him hanging and, wishing to avoid the scandal of suicide, cut him down. The father, Jean Calas, a prosperous merchant of Toulouse, was arrested and charged with the murder of his son. The motive imputed to him was that the younger Calas wished to convert to Catholicism and the father, a Protestant, killed him to prevent that. To the mob and the authorities, Marc-Antoine was a Catholic martyr. Under horrible torture, Calas refused to confess and even during his execution by being broken on the wheel, he clung to the story of suicide. His body was then burnt, his daughters were forced into a convent, his wife and sons forced to flee and his property was confiscated.

The case was taken up by the philosophe Voltaire who used it as a way of attacking the Catholic Church, accusing them of perverting justice in order to kill a Protestant. Since the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau by Louis XIV, Catholicism had been the country’s only legal religion and Huguenots (French Protestants) always worshipped and lived under a cloud. In his Traité sur la Tolerance à l’occasion de la mort de Jean Calas Voltaire excoriated the Church for its bigotry, obscurantism and fanaticism. The case became a cause célebre throughout Europe and did much to discredit religion in the eyes of those who considered themselves enlightened.

What is less well known is the reaction of the court of Louis XV. Within less than three years of the trial, the king ordered a new panel to reconsider the evidence. They voted to rehabilitate the reputation of Jean Calas and vacate the guilty sentence. Louis XV also paid restitution to the family.

St Rose of Viterbo’s Day

Rose (1234-52) was a short-lived but meteoric saint of thirteenth-century Italy whose astonishing career began at age 3 when she raised her aunt from the dead. At the age of seven she was living an ascetic lifestyle; by the age of ten she believed she had been commissioned by the Virgin Mary and was preaching repentance in the streets and leading religious processions. She had a reputation as a prophet and as one who could communicate with the birds. For taking the side of the papacy in the quarrel with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, she was exiled to Soriano where she prophesied the death of the emperor — this occurred within a week. In a neighbouring town she confronted a notorious sorceress and converted the townspeople and the witch by standing unscathed for three hours in a burning pyre.

Returning to Viterbo, Rose wished to enter the Poor Clares, a Franciscan order for women, but was refused because she was too poor to bring a “dowry” with her. She prophesied that she would be admitted after her death which took place shortly after at age 17. Pope Alexander IV ordered the convent to receive her body.

Rose is the patron saint of Viterbo, exiles and those refused by religious orders. A procession honouring her takes place yearly in her native town.

1616

Copernicus is added to the Index of Prohibited Books

The Polish priest Nicolas Copernicus was the first astronomer to effectively challenge the age-old notion of a universe with the Earth at its centre. In his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), published in 1543 shortly before its author’s death, Copernicus proposed a heliocentric system, with the sun surrounded by the Earth, the stars and other planets. The book solved many of the problems astronomers had been having in calculating the movement of the heavens, but it was an incomplete solution, leaving more work to be done by the likes of Brahe, Kepler and Galileo.

The book was dedicated to Pope Paul III but it contained notions that seemed to be at odds not only with established scientific orthodoxy but Scripture as well. Certainly Martin Luther was at odds with heliocentrism, saying “people gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon … This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.” The Catholic Church was also troubled by it, as the scandal with Galileo proved, and in 1616 it put Copernicus’s writings on the Index.

This Holy Congregation has also learned about the spreading and acceptance by many of the false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to the Holy Scripture, that the earth moves and the sun is motionless, which is also taught by Nicholaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and by Diego de Zúñiga’s In Job … Therefore, in order that this opinion may not creep any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth, the Congregation has decided that the books by Nicolaus Copernicus [De revolutionibus] and Diego de Zúñiga [who had defended Copernicus in his book In Job] be suspended until corrected.

The book remained prohibited until 1758 when Pope Benedict XIV removed it from the Index.

St Hadrian of Nicomedia’s Day

As the bodyguard of Eastern Roman emperor Galerius, Adrian was so impressed by the fortitude of Christians undergoing persecution in 306 that he decided to become one himself. This naturally led to his own martyrdom, a gruesome process that involved being broken by an anvil, thrown to the lions and chopped into pieces. Adrian may be invoked by believers suffering from epilepsy or the plague and he is the patron of arms dealers, butchers, prison guards and soldiers.

St Casimir’s Day

Casimir (1461-84) was not your usual late-medieval prince. The son of King Casimir IV, he was uncomfortable with worldly power and, growing up, got a reputation for prayer, asceticism and all-round saintliness. When ordered by his father to lead what he felt was an unjust invasion of Hungary, Prince Casimir turned the army around and came home, resulting in his banishment to a remote castle. He also refused to fight any Christian country when the Turks were posing such a danger to Europe. Preferring celibacy, he rejected the political marriage planned for him by his father and concentrated on acts of charity. He died of a lung disease at the age of 23.

Casimir is the patron saint of Poland and Lithuania.

1570

Pius V excommunicates Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I succeed to the throne of England in 1558, following the death of her half-sister Mary who had reunited the English church to Roman Catholicism. The Elizabethan Church Settlement reversed Mary’s policy and established a Protestant church with the Queen as Supreme Governor. The open practice of Catholicism was banned but the government made little effort to root out private nonconformity. This moderation plus Elizabeth’s cynical marriage negotiations with Continental princes kept Catholic Europe at bay for over a decade.

This situation changed when Catholic opposition broke out into the open with the 1569 revolt of the northern earls. Rome-leaning nobles also conspired to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. Hoping to aid the English Catholic cause, Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and in the bull Regnans in Excelsis absolved subjects of their allegiance to the queen. Elizabeth, said the pope, was a “pretended queen of England and the servant of crime [who] . . . seized the crown and monstrously usurped the place of supreme head of the Church in all England to gather with the chief authority and jurisdiction belonging to it [and] once again reduced this same kingdom – which had already been restored to the Catholic faith and to good fruits – to a miserable ruin.”

We charge and command all and singular the nobles, subjects, peoples and others afore said that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary we include in the like sentence of excommunication.

This was enormously maladroit. By the time the bull was promulgated the Northern Rebellion had been defeated and the leaders fled into Scotland or the Continent. The lasting effect of the bull was to encourage an even harder policy toward Catholic subjects and to convince patriotic Englishmen that Catholicism meant foreign influence and tyranny.

This was a rare mistake by an otherwise astute pope, now considered a saint by the Catholic Church.

303

The long Diocletianic persecution of Christianity begins

By the late 3rd century the Roman empire was in dreadful shape, besieged by barbarian invaders, rent by rival generals claiming the throne, the economy eroded by inflation, crushing taxation and a flight from the cities. The rot was halted by Diocletian, a general from the Balkans who took over in 284 and instituted a series of reforms that saved the empire. He divided the empire into four parts, arranged for an ordered succession, instituted price controls and renewed the army. A key part of his plan was to elevate the status of the emperor, to make him a semi-divine figure beyond criticism. Christianity thus presented a problem as its adherents offered to pray for the emperor but refused to worship him.

In 303 Diocletian decreed an empire-wide drive to flush out Christian supporters and make them conform or suffer. All citizens were required to attend an official ceremony in which they would be told to perform some anti-Christian act such as burning the scriptures or defacing a picture of Christ. Many complied, some fled into the wilderness but many resisted and were martyred. The succession of Constantine and his Edict of Milan of 313 would offer toleration to Christians and began the process of making it the empire’s dominant religion.

1945

The death of Eric Liddell

Eric Liddell (1902-45) was a Scottish athlete and missionary who won fame at the 1924 Olympics and who would be immortalized in the film Chariots of Fire.

Liddell was born in China to missionary parents and lived in that country until he was 5 when he was sent back to Britain to go to school. At his public school and the University of Edinburgh he excelled as an athlete and played international rugby for Scotland. Selected for the British track team for the Paris Olympics of 1924, he decided that he could not participate in 100 metre sprint in which he was a favourite because the heats were run on the Sabbath Day. Instead he competed in the 200 and 400 metre races. Before the latter, a distance at which he had never done particularly well, a member of the American team’s support staff slipped him a note with a quotation from I Samuel 2:30: “Those who honor me I will honor.” Liddell drew the difficult outside lane which meant that for the first part of the race he was unable to see the pace of his competition so he set off at a blistering pace and managed to hang on for the gold medal. The time he set was an Olympic and world record. In the same Games he won a bronze in the 200 metres. These medals came despite an awkward running style that was much mocked.

In 1925 he left for the mission field of China and served as a teacher and ordained minister there until his death, returning to Britain for furlough only rarely. He married the daughter of a Canadian missionary and their family produced three daughters. The invasion of China by Japan forced the missionaries to either flee and abandon their flocks or to move them to areas of greater safety. Liddell sent his wife and children to Canada but remained in China. When his mission was overrun by the Japanese, he was interned in a prison camp. His life there seems also to have been one of exemplary sacrifice and service. Liddell refused to be freed in a prisoner exchange and gave his place to a pregnant woman. He died there in 1945 of a brain tumour.

1547

The coronation of England’s first Protestant king

Edward VI (1537-53) was the son of Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour. Though his father had withdrawn the English Church from obedience to Rome, it was still entirely Catholic in liturgy and theology. Edward, however, was raised among Protestant sympathizers and teachers and during his short reign the nation adopted Protestant church policies.

When his father died in 1547, Edward succeeded to the throne ahead of his older half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. Those at court who leaned toward religious reform now became instantly bolder. Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, preached a sermon at Edward’s coronation calling the new king a second “Josiah” (a young king of Judah in the 7th century B.C. who attacked idols) and called for him to ensure the “the tyranny of the Bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed”.

During Edward’s reign, all which was spent under the guidance of regents, clerical celibacy and the mass were abolished, a Protestant Book of Common  Prayer was ordained and the last elements of monasticism were eradicated. Continental reformers were sought as preachers and university teachers. Catholic incumbents who resisted these changes were removed and in some cases imprisoned. In the process, ecclesiastical lands were seized by well-connected courtiers and the English church structure was much weakened.

Edward’s religious reforms seemed doomed when he died at age 15 to be succeeded by his Catholic half-sister Mary whose persecution of Protestantism won her the name “Bloody Mary” but she too died after a brief reign and without issue. The church instituted under Elizabeth I who reigned from 1558 was built on the Edwardian mode.