Christmas Every Day

1891

Birth of a martyr priest.

August Froehlich (1891-1942) was born into a well-to-do Prussian family and as a young man served with distinction in the German army during World War I, being wounded on both the Eastern and the Western Fronts and winning the Iron Cross. After the war he studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood and was ordained in 1921. During the economic crisis during the Weimar Republic he used his own finances to support the poor. When the Nazis came into power in 1933 he made his opposition to them public, refusing to use the “Heil Hitler” greeting. After the beginning of the Second World War Froehlich ministered to Catholic Polish slave labourers who were imported to Germany. His defence of them when they were abused led to his arrest. He ended his days in the “priest barracks” of Dachau concentration camp where the Nazis would hold over 2,700 clerics, dying of mistreatment in 1942.

 

1907

Birth of a warrior priest.

Dimitrios Holevas (1907-2001) was a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church. He originally studied archaeology and literature but in his 30s he was ordained into the clergy. When Germany invaded Greece during World War II, he went underground and joined ELAS, the Greek People’s Liberation Army. He became famous as Papa-Holevas (“Father Holevas”), organizing his fellow priests to support the resistance and taking part in military actions himself. He was elected a delegate to the left-wing war-time parliament. At the end of the hostilities with Germany, a civil war broke out in Greece between ELAS, dominated by Communists, and right-wing forces supported by Britain and the United States. Finding himself on the losing side, Holevas was suspended from his clerical functions for three years. He was later rehabilitated and lived to a ripe old age, decorated by the Greek Church.

1536

The execution of an Anabaptist king.

Jan of Leiden (1509-36) was a tailor’s apprentice from the Dutch city of Leiden. In 1535 he joined the millennial Anabaptists who had taken over Münster in Westphalia. When the leader of these radicals was killed in a quixotic battle Jan replaced him as King. He ruled the besieged city with an iron fist, decreeing community of goods and polygamy. It is said that he took 21 wives and executed one prospective bride with his own sword for the crime of not wishing to marry him. When the forces of the Catholic bishop finally broke into the city, Jan was captured and on this day in 1536 taken into the public square where he was tortured to death along with two of his aides. Their bodies were placed in iron cages on hoisted to the top of a church tower where they remained for decades as a warning to would-be rebels against the established order. The cages became a sort of symbol of the city and remain to be seen to this day.

710

The death of St Adrian of Canterbury

No part of the Roman Empire had been as hard hit by the barbarian invasions as Britain. Waves of Germanic invaders from the east, Picts from the north, and Irish from the west had come close to completely extinguishing civilization on the island. City life was abandoned, the money economy virtually disappeared, and literacy was extremely rare; the native Christian church fled into the remoter areas. Only around the year 600 was there an attempt by Rome to evangelize the pagan Anglo-Saxon colonists. Though a toe-hold was established around Canterbury in the southeast, the mission to the Germanic kingdoms was a slow and dangerous one. One reason that it succeeded was that Christianity offered these barbarians ties with the re-emerging European civilization, as represented by the Church.

We can see this, for example, in the arrival in England in 669 of Theodore of Tarsus as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Born at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, he was not Pope Vitalian’s first choice for the post — that fell on the North African monk Adrian who instead recommended Theodore. The pope agreed, provided that Adrian accompany the expedition. He did so and was made abbot of the monastery in Canterbury. Together Adrian and Theodore consolidated Roman influence, developed schools teaching astronomy, music, Roman law, Greek, and Latin. They improved the education of the clergy, making them less the servants of their families or their localities and more the representatives of an international organization. They imported foreign craftsmen, such as glass-makers and builders and artists as well as foreign-produced books. Under Adrian the monastery became a centre of learning and the task of recivilizing Britain was advanced.

1536 The death of Katharine of Aragon.

Katharine, born 1485, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. At the age of three she was betrothed to Prince Arthur, the heir to the English throne whom she married in 1501. His death shortly thereafter left her in an anomalous position as her father-in-law Henry VII refused to return her dowry to her parents. The problem was solved when she was pledged to marry the new heir, Henry, a union which required a papal dispensation and Katharine’s testimony that her marriage to Arthur had not been physically consummated. In 1509, at the age of 23 she married the newly-crowned Henry VIII who had not yet turned 18.

For a decade the marriage seemed to be a happy one, though Katharine, despite six pregnancies, gave birth to only one child who lived, a daughter Mary. This was a dynastic catastrophe for the Tudor throne as it was not clear whether a woman could ascend the English throne (the single precedent of the Empress Maud was not a happy one). By 1520 when it was clear that Katharine could conceive no more, Henry turned to a series of mistresses, one of whom produced an illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. Henry sought ways to rid himself of his wife, claiming that his marriage to his brother’s widow was illegal in canon law (normally it was, which was why he had been granted a dispensation by the pope.) His agents sought the opinions of Europe’s legal faculties; his envoy besieged the pope to no avail; he convened an ecclesiastical council; he tried to bully Katharine into retirement in a convent. Finally when his latest mistress Anne Boleyn became pregnant, Henry grew desperate.

In 1533 Thomas Cranmer, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, ruled that Henry and Katharine’s marriage had been irregular and declared it annulled. Katharine was shut away in various castles, denied any royal honours and forbidden contact with her daughter Mary, now considered a bastard. Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn scandalized Europe and drove Henry to break with the Roman Catholic Church, naming himself in 1534 the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Katharine’s supporters such as Cardinal Fisher and Sir Thomas More were judicially murdered on the king’s orders.

When she lay dying Katharine wrote a last letter to Henry:

My most dear lord, King and husband,

The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forces me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I desire to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that my eyes desire you above all things.

Katharine the Queen.

On the day of Katharine’s funeral, Anne Boleyn suffered a miscarriage. She was never able to produce the male heir that led Henry to put away his first wife; she was executed in 1536.

1581

Birth of James Ussher, Anglican bishop in Ireland and author of a famous chronology of the world. Ussher became a priest in 1602 and by 1625 was named Archbishop of Armagh, Anglican Primate of Ireland (a country ruled by England and largely Roman Catholic). Ussher opposed making any concessions to the Catholic majority or weakening the hold of the English crown on the island but he was also opposed to the Arminian innovations Archbishop Laud was making in the Church of England. The Civil War meant that Ussher’s last years were spent mostly in scholarship and particularly the quest to date the age of the world. In Ussher’s opinion, the earth was created in 4004 BC, Solomon’s temple was built in 1004 BC and Christ was born in 4 BC. Though we might snicker at such a viewpoint, his scholarship, given the sources he had, was impressive. Ussher died in 1656 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

1821

Elizabeth Ann Seton, first Catholic saint born in the United States, dies in Maryland. Born into an New York Episcopalian family in 1774, she married at the age of 19 and had five children with her husband William Magee Seton. After his death in 1803 she began to be interested in Roman Catholicism and converted in 1805, but anti-Catholic sentiment in New York caused her to move to Maryland where she opened a school for girls. In 1809 she founded a religious community named the Sisters of Charity, dedicated to the education of poor children. Mother Seton was canonized in 1975.

 

Feast of St Thorlak

Among the more obscure saints of the Advent season is St. Thorlak Thorhallsson (1133-1193), a medieval Icelandic monk and bishop of Skaholt famous for his attempts to reform and purify his nation’s churches and monasteries. His feast day is December 23, which is marked in Iceland by a meal of skate hash, similar to lutefisk, whose plain charms make the Christmas feast more appealing. It is also a day for decorating the Yule tree and shopping for last-minute gifts.

Though Thorlak was well-known in his native country it was not until 1984 that he was canonized by Pope John Paul II and named patron saint of Iceland.

 

1588

The murder of the Duke de Guise

The French Wars of Religion had raged for nearly 40 years and had divided France into three armed camps, each recognizing someone named Henri as the true ruler. The king was Henri III, of the Valois dynasty, leader of the royalist, moderate Catholic party nicknamed les Politiques, so called because they were said to value political stability above religious truth.  He was opposed by Henri of Navarre, the leader of the French Protestants, and Henri, the Duke de Guise, who led the ultra-Catholic League. Guise had driven the king from Paris and allied himself with the Spanish to exterminate Protestantism in western Europe.

On December 23, 1588 Henry III invited his cousin, the Duke de Guise to his palace at Blois under the pretext of discussing a truce. There he was set upon by the royal bodyguard and murdered. The next day, his brother Louis, the Cardinal de Guise, was also assassinated. Henri III did not survive much longer; in August 1589 he was murdered by a young Catholic fanatic disguised as a priest. This left Henri de Navarre, the Protestant claimant, as the last man standing. Realizing the majority of Frenchmen would accept only a Catholic as king, Navarre converted and ended the French Wars of Religion.

1216 The Dominican Order is officially confirmed.

In the early thirteenth century the power of the papacy was at its height but the reputation of the Church was not. New heresies were springing up among the people and the clergy had a reputation for being rich, unlearned and aloof. Two young men responded: in Italy, Francis of Assisi; in Spain, Dominic de Guzmán.

As a priest, Dominic encountered the Cathar heretics of France who were well supported by local nobles and popular with the poor. This led Dominic to realize that the Church required itinerant, well-educated preachers who could combat religious heterodoxy and that this new sort of clergy should embrace poverty. Living off charity and working among the common people was the ideal of this new order, called Dominicans after its founder, but chartered by the papacy in 1216 as the Order of Preachers. Clad in white robes with a black cloak they became highly effective exponents of Catholic doctrine in markets and churches. They also came to staff the great new universities of Europe, especially Paris where its members included Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and to be among the directors of the Inquisition. In Italy they produced famous mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Henry Suso; in Italy they included fierce opponents of papal corruption such as Girolamo Savonarola.

A Latin pun on their name, Domini canes, has caused them to be known as the “Hounds of the Lord”.

The Feast of St Lazarus: “And he that was dead came forth”.

What we know for certain of this saint is contained in chapter 11 of John’s gospel. Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus and brother to Mary and Martha, has died and been buried when Jesus arrives:

 Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept.  

Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him! And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.

Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days. Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him.

The only other canonical mention of Lazarus lies in noting his presence at a feast on the day before Palm Sunday but later legends are rich in their stories of this remarkable individual. One account dealing with his life after the resurrection of Jesus has him and other Christians miraculously escaping persecution by being transported to southern France in a boat without sails or oars and in the company of Mary Magdalene. He is said to have preached in the port of Marseilles where he was made the town’s first bishop. Though he remained safe during the persecutions by Nero he was caught up later in the century in that ordained by the emperor Domitian. He was executed and his remains can be found in the cathedral of Autun.

Other stories, told in the East, say that Lazarus fled to Cyrus where he became the first bishop of Lanarca. His remains were said to be transferred to Constantinople but a church, still standing, was built over his (second) tomb. There are a number of sites in Bethany claiming to be the spot of his original four-day burial. It was widely believed that Lazarus, after his resurrection, never smiled, being grimly aware of the plight of souls in Hades. His feast is celebrated on a number of different dates in different parts of Christendom.

37

The birth of the emperor Nero.

How do you rule an empire when you pretend that you’re living in a republic? When Octavius Caesar seized control of the Roman Republic, ruling it from 31 BC to 14 AD, he maintained the fiction that all the old republican institutions still functioned and that he was merely “princeps” or “first citizen”. This lie allowed a strong one-man rule while seeming to be continuing a 500-year old tradition. The fiction was harder to maintain as succeeding members of Caesar’s family proved to be mad, tyrannous or both. Tiberius, who ruled during the public career of Jesus of Nazareth, became paranoid and addicted to fortune tellers. Caligula was convinced he was a living god and Claudius was notoriously dim-witted. The last of this Julio-Claudian dynasty was to be Nero, self-styled poet and murderer of his tutor, step-brother, wives, and mother.

In 64 Nero, wishing to redevelop Rome and build an enormous palace, had fires set which gutted the heart of the city. Rather than accept blame Nero accused others. According to the historian Tacitus:

 Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.

Tacitus in recording Nero’s actions provides a non-Christian testimony to the historicity of the crucifixion and the visible presence of a Christian community in Rome at the time when Peter and Paul were said to have been murdered by state persecution.

1417

Execution of Sir John Oldcastle.

Oldcastle, later Lord Cobham, served as a soldier and politician in the reigns of the first Lancastrian kings, Henry IV and Henry V. He became influenced by the Wyclifite heresy (also known as Lollardy) and sheltered its adherents from government persecution. Lollards are often termed as proto-Protestants in that they favoured scripture in the English language and predestination while they opposed church wealth, papal power and transubstantiation. The sixteenth-century English reformer John Bale wrote of him:

The truth of it is, that after he had once throughly tasted the Christian doctrine of John Wicliffe and of his disciples, and perceived their livings agreeable to the same, he abhorred all the superstitious sorceries (ceremonies, I should say) of the proud Romish church … He tried all matters by the scriptures, and so proved their spirit whether they were of God or nay. He maintained such preachers in the dioceses of Canterbury, London, Rochester, and Hereford, as the bishops were sore offended with. He exhorted their priests to a better way by the gospel; and when that would not help, he gave them sharp rebukes.

This open support of heresy came in a bad time as Henry V had passed legislation allowing the burning of religious dissidents. Oldcastle was imprisoned in the Tower of London but escaped. On recapture he was condemned to be hanged in chains and burnt alive. His death and those of others of high rank who had espoused Lollardy drove the movement underground for over a century.