Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of Italian immigrants. He became a Jesuit in 1960 and was ordained to the priesthood seven years later. He served the order as a teacher and theologian but his opposition to “liberation theology” and his emphasis on pastoral work rather than critiquing contemporary society led to a falling out with his Jesuit superiors in Argentina.
Despite a Jesuit rule forbidding members from attaining high office in the church Bergoglio was named a bishop in 1992 and became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1997. He became known for his decision to have his priests penetrate the poorer areas of his diocese and for curbing extravagant spending. He was also noted for his call for national repentance for the violence and terrorism of Argentine political life in past eras.
At age 75 he resigned as Archbishop but was named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, whereupon he moved to Rome where his simple living attracted attention. At the papal conclave to elect a successor to John Paul he is said to have finished second to Cardinal Ratzinger in the voting. On Ratzinger’s resignation in 2013 Bergoglio was chosen pope and took the name Francis, after St Francis of Assisi. He thus became the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere, the first non-European since 714.
Since his election, he has proved an enigmatic leader of the Roman Catholic world, giving off mixed signals about gay marriage, women as deacons, communion for divorced couples, and indigenous spirituality without actually directly challenging received teachings. Francis is perceived to be over-friendly to leftist regimes and has angered theological conservatives with his restrictions on the Tridentine mass. He is the first pope to have an Instagram account.
Only three popes have merited the title of “the Great” (though fans of John Paul II are trying hard to make it a quartet.) The second of these to be born (c. 540) was Gregorius Anicius, who renounced great wealth to become a monk. In 590 he was elected pope and became a powerful force for good in the ruins of the western Roman empire. You will not find a more loving tribute to him than this 19th-century account.
There have been Popes of every shade of human character. Gregory the Great is one distinguished by modesty, disinterestedness, and sincere religious zeal, tempered by a toleration which could only spring from pure benevolence. The son of a Roman senator, with high mental gifts, and all the accomplishments of his age, he was drawn forward into prominent positions, but always against his will. He would have fain continued to be an obscure monk or a missionary, but his qualities were such that at length even the popedom was thrust upon him (on the death of Pelagius II in 590). On this occasion he wrote to the sister of the Emperor: ‘Appearing to be outwardly exalted, I am really fallen. My endeavours were to banish corporeal objects from my mind, that I might spiritually behold heavenly joys. I am come into the depths of the sea, and the tempest hath drowned me.’
The writings of Pope Gregory, which fill four folio volumes, are said to be very admirable. The English King Alfred showed his appreciation of one treatise by translating it. In exercising the functions of his high station, Gregory exhibited great mildness and forbearance. He eagerly sought to convert the heathen, and to bring heretics back to the faith: but he never would sanction the adoption of any harsh. measures for these purposes. One day-before he attained the papal chair-walking through the market in Rome, he was struck by the beauty of a group of young persons exposed to be sold as slaves. In answer to his inquiry of who they were, and whence they came, he was told they were Angli, from the heathen island of Britain. ‘Verily, Angeli,’ he said, punning on the name: ‘how lamentable that the prince of darkness should be the master of a country containing such a beautiful people! How sad that, with so fair an outside, there should be nothing of God’s grace within! His wish was immediately to set out as a missionary to England, and it was with difficulty he was prevented. The incident, however, led to a mission being ere long sent to our then benighted country, which thus owed its first reception of Christian light to Gregory.
Almsgiving, in such Protestant countries as England, is denounced as not so much a lessening of human suffering as a means of engendering and extending pauperism. Gregory had no such fears to stay his bountiful hand. With him to relieve the poor was the first of Christian graces. He devoted a large proportion of his revenue and a vast amount of personal care to this object. He in a manner took the entire charge of the poor upon his own hands. ‘He relieved their necessities with. so much sweetness and affability, as to spare them the confusion of receiving alms; the old men among them he, out of deference, called his fathers. He often entertained several of them at his own table. He kept by him an exact catalogue of the poor, called by the ancients Matriculae; and he liberally provided for the necessities of each. In the beginning of every month he distributed to all the poor corn, wine, pulse, cheese, fish, flesh, and oil; he appointed officers for every street, to send every day necessaries to all the needy sick: before he ate, he always sent off meats from his own table to some poor persons.’ There may be some bad moral results from this wholesale system of relief for poverty, but certainly the motives which prompted it must be acknowledged to have been highly amiable.
Gregory was a weakly man, often suffering from bad health, and he did not get beyond the age of sixty-four. We owe to him a phrase which has become a sort of formula for the popes-‘Servant of the servants of God.’ His name, which is the same as Vigilantius or Watchman, became, from veneration for him, a favourite one: we find it borne, amongst others, by a Scottish prince of the eighth century, the reputed progenitor of the clan M’Gregor. It is curious to think of this formidable band of Highland outlaws of the seventeenth century as thus connected by a chain of historical circumstances with the gentle and saintly Gregory, who first caused the lamp of Christianity to be planted in England.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is now recognized as the towering genius of classical music but there was a time after his death when he had largely faded from public memory. His work was respected by later composers but JS Bach’s major works were seldom performed. Such was the case of his monumental musical treatment of the suffering and death of Jesus according to the Gospel of Matthew. Written for two choirs and two orchestras it was meant to be performed on Good Friday.
Felix Mendelssohn had been given a copy of The St Matthew Passion which Bach had written in 1727 and which had not been performed outside of Leipzig since 1750. Mendelssohn’s staging of the oratorio in 1829 attracted great crowds in three sell-our performances and contributed much to the revival of interest in Bach’s music.
Here is a video of the final chorus, performed by a Swedish choir and orchestra.
Paul Lacroix was a 19th-century French librarian, historian, and novelist, best known for his encyclopedic works on the life of the Middle Ages. In his Manners, Customs and Dress During the Middle Ages, he provides wonderful glimpses of customs long dead. Today we will look at what he had to say about attitudes to food and fasting therefrom. As we are now in the midst of the Lenten season, it is proper to notice the seriousness with which our ancestors regarded the duties of abstinence.
A monk of the Abbey of Cluny once went on a visit to his relations. On arriving he asked for food; but as it was a fast day he was told there was nothing in the house but fish. Perceiving some chickens in the yard, he took a stick and killed one, and brought it to his relations, saying, “This is the fish which I shall eat to-day.” “Eh, but, my son, they said, “have you dispensation from fasting on a Friday?” “No,” he answered; “but poultry is not flesh; fish and fowls were created at the same time; they have a common origin, as the hymn which I sing in the service teaches me.”
This simple legend belongs to the tenth century; and notwithstanding that the opinion of this Benedictine monk may appear strange nowadays, yet it must be acknowledged that he was only conforming himself to the opinions laid down by certain theologians. In 817, the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle decided that such delicate nourishment could scarcely be called mortification as understood by the teaching of the Church. In consequence of this an order was issued forbidding the monks to eat poultry, except during four days at Easter and four at Christmas. But this prohibition in no way changed the established custom of certain parts of Christendom, and the faithful persisted in believing that poultry and fish were identical in the eyes of the Church, and accordingly continued to eat them indiscriminately. We also see, in the middle of the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas, who was considered an authority in questions of dogma and of faith, ranking poultry amongst species of aquatic origin.
An edict of Henry II, 1549, forbade the sale of meat in Lent to persons who should not be furnished with a doctor’s certificate. Charles IX forbade the sale of meat to the Huguenots; and it was ordered that the privilege of selling meat during the time of abstinence should belong exclusively to the hospitals. Orders were given to those who retailed meat to take the address of every purchaser, although he had presented a medical certificate, so that the necessity for his eating meat might be verified. Subsequently, the medical certificate required to be endorsed by the priest, specifying what quantity of meat was required.
The great shame of the Christian Church after its legalization in the 4th century and its subsequent conversion of the Roman Empire was its tendency to acrimony and schism in debates about the nature of Christ. Some of these struggles were necessary: the notion of Arius that Christ was a subordinate creation of God and the assertions of the Trinitarians that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were coequal and coeternal could not live together harmoniously in the same Church. (The fact that the barbarian conquerors were usually Arian Christians made this an even more vexed question.)
Bu the later quarrels over the balance of human and divine natures in Christ and whether Christ had a single energy or a single will led to a blizzard of contending schools — Nestorians, Chalcedonians, Eutychians, Monophysites, Miaphysites, Mononergists, Monotheletists, not to mention Monarchianists, Modalists of various stripes, Sabellians, and Adoptionists – that were not always edifying.
Enter then Pope Felix II (or III if you count an earlier antipope in your calculations). His uncompromising nature led to excommunications by the bucketful and a nasty schism. On his accession in 483 he was faced with a Monophysite patriarch in Alexandria (Middle Eastern Christians tended toward the belief that Christ’s divine nature pretty much eclipsed his human nature) and a well-meaning attempt by the Emperor Zeno to bridge the Monophysite/Chalcedonian gap with a document known as the Henoticon. Felix’s response was to denounce the emperor and the Alexandrian bishop and excommunicate Acacius the Patriarch of Constantinople. This provoked a schism between Rome and Constantinople that lasted for decades.
Felix was equally rigid in his treatment of North African Christians who had submitted to an Arian baptism after persecution by the Vandals. He announced that they could be reconciled to the Catholic communion only on their deathbed.
For some reason he was deemed to be a saint. He is not to be confused with Felix of Nola, the patron saint of spiders.
Polycarp (69-155) was a bishop of Asia Minor who had, according to tradition, studied under St. John, the last of the original Twelve Apostles, thus an important link between primitive Christianity and the expanding Church. Called upon to apostatize and worship the imperial cult, Polycarp refused, saying: “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Saviour? You threaten me with a fire that burns for a season, and after a little while is quenched; but you are ignorant of the fire of everlasting punishment that is prepared for the wicked.” He was burned at the state. He is the patron saint of those suffering from dysentery and earache.
303 The Beginning of the Great Persecution
Christianity had been intermittently subject to persecution since its inception but there were two periods of intense and focussed attempts to exterminate the new religion, one in the mid-3rd century under the emperor Decius and, the second and most murderous, under Diocletian beginning on this date in 303 when he attacked the church in the eastern capital Nicomedia. Diocletian had embarked on a successful series of reforms to rehabilitate the empire’s finances, military strength, and cohesion. Christians, by refusing to worship the emperor or any of the other Roman gods, were thus a political threat.
Image of the majestic Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey.
532 The foundation of Hagia Sophia is laid
In the two centuries following the persecutions of Diocletian, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire. The greatest church in Christendom (and the most imposing building on Earth for the next millennium) was the Church of Holy Wisdom, commissioned by the emperor Justinian to replace the one destroyed during the Nike Rebellion. Pictured above is how it would have looked before it was converted to a mosque in the 15th century and the addition of four minarets.
1455 The printing of the Gutenberg Bible
Though the Chinese had used block printing for centuries, Europe had lacked a way of mechanically reproducing books until Johann Gutenberg of Mainz invented a moveable-type press. The first fruit of his labours was a Vulgate Bible, a 5th-century Latin translation by St Jerome of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. This was a moment whose revolutionary impact cannot be over-estimated.
Feast of the Translation of the Relics of St John ChrysostomYou may have noticed that the more important Christian saints have a number of feast days dedicated to them. One good reason to mark their life is if their relics have been moved from one spot to another, usually a more honoured, location — such a shift in bones is called a translation. On this day in 438, the remains of the most celebrated preacher of the ancient Church were moved from where he had died on his way to exile to Constantinople’s Church of the Holy Peace.
John had been banished in 407 for upsetting the sensibilities of the Empress Eudoxia who was offended by his comparison of her to the evil wife of Herod. In 438 Proclus, the patriarch of Constantinople convinced Emperor Theodosius II, son of Eudoxia, to fetch the saint’s bones back to the imperial capital. The story goes:
The emperor, overwhelmed by Saint Proclus, gave his consent and gave the order to transfer the relics of Saint John. But those he sent were unable to lift the holy relics until the emperor realized that he had sent men to take the saint’s relics from Comana with an edict, instead of with a prayer. He wrote a letter to Saint John, humbly asking him to forgive his audacity, and to return to Constantinople. After the message was read at the grave of Saint John, they easily took up the relics, carried them onto a ship and arrived at Constantinople.
Safely in his new home, John’s body was visited by Theodosius who apologized for this mother’s actions.
In 1204 Latin crusaders broke open the tomb and stole the relics but in 2004 some of them were returned by Pope John Paul II and are now ensconced in St George’s Church, Istanbul. A silver and jewel-encrusted skull is held in the Vatopedi Monastery in Greece and the monks of Mount Athos venerate it as John’s but the Russian Orthodox Church claims that Vatopedi sold the skull to the Russian czar in the 17th century and they now have it in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Not to be outdone, two Italian churches also assert that they have the saint’s head.
The Church named January 25 as the festival day for the celebration of the conversion of St Paul (aka Paul of Tarsus) described in Acts 9. It was once the occasion of a colourful procession in London, whose patron saint was Paul. In 1555, in the reign of Mary and Philip, it is recorded that:
On St. Paul’s day there was a general procession with the children of all the schools in London, with all the clerks, curates, and parsons, and vicars, in copes, with their crosses; also the choir of St. Paul’s; and divers bishops in their habits, and the Bishop of London, with his pontificals and cope, bearing the sacrament under a canopy, and four prebends bearing it in their gray amos; and so up into Leadenhall, with the mayor and aldermen in scarlet, with their cloaks, and all the crafts in their best array; and so came down again on the other side, and so to St. Paul’s again. And then the king, with my lord cardinal, came to St. Paul’s, and heard masse, and went home again; and at night great bonfires were made through all London, for the joy of the people that were converted likewise as St. Paul was converted.
Connected to this day was the yearly presentation to the cathedral’s clergy of a fat buck and doe, an obligation incurred in 1375 in recompense for the enclosure of some of the Dean’s land. It sounds pretty darn pagan to me.
On these days, the buck and the doe were brought by one or more servants at the hour of the procession, and through the midst thereof, and offered at the high altar of St. Paul’s Cathedral: after which the persons that brought the buck received of the Dean and Chapter, by the hands of their Chamberlain, twelve pence sterling for their entertainment; but nothing when they brought the doe. The buck being brought to the steps of the altar, the Dean and Chapter, appareled in copes and proper vestments, with garlands of roses on their heads, sent the body of the buck to be baked, and had the head and horns fixed on a pole before the cross, in their procession round about the church, till they issued at the west door, where the keeper that brought it blowed the death of the buck, and then the horns that were about the city answered him in like manner; for which they had each, of the Dean and Chapter, three and fourpence in money, and their dinner; and the keeper, during his stay, meat, drink, and lodging, and five shillings in money at his going away; together with a loaf of bread, having in it the picture of St. Paul.
Pascal publishes the first of his Provincial Letters.
Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was an enormously influential French scientist, philosopher and religious writer. His work on hydraulic power, geometry, mathematics and mechanical computation helped to energize the nascent Second Scientific Revolution.
In his 20s Pascal became acquainted with Jansenism, a Catholic movement with pronounced ideas on grace which ran into controversy with Church authorities who labelled it a heresy. Before the sect was outlawed by the pope and Louis XIV, Pascal began to write on religious subjects. On this day in 1656 he published the first of his Provincial Letters, which were eventually to number eighteen. In them, Pascal, under a pseudonym, used brilliant satire and elegant language to attack current notions on grace and the Jesuit use of the philosophical tool known as casuistry, which Pascal condemned as a mere clever use of language to rationalize moral laxity. The series of essays won wide praise for its literary style but condemnation for its religious content. The king ordered the writings shredded and publicly burnt; Pascal had to go into hiding.
The Provincial Letters remain a monument of French literature, praised by critics of all sorts. The agnostic philosophe Voltaire and Bossuet, the ultra-orthodox Catholic bishop, were both admirers. Even the 20th-century Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc, who attacked Pascal’s accusations against the Jesuits, spoke of the work’s “wit and fervour”.
Pascal is probably best known for his famous wager about the existence of God, outlined in his Pensées and a giant step in probability theory.
If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is…God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is infinite chaos that separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it.
“No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
Though the prohibition of alcohol is a story well-known to fans of Elliot Ness and the Untouchables, less attention has been paid to the serious campaigns waged against the consumption of tobacco.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was a leader in this campaign, urging boys and girls to take the Clean Life Pledge: “I hereby pledge myself with the help of God to abstain from all intoxicating liquors as a beverage and from the use of tobacco in any form.” At the turn of the 20th century a number of states and municipalities had enacted legislation banning the sale of cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco. Particularly worrisome to the nation’s legislators was the sight of the fair sex ingesting the smoke of the demon weed.
On January 21, 1908 New York City passed an ordinance, the Sullivan Act, forbidding women from smoking in public. The very next day, a female scofflaw named Katie Mulcahey was arrested after striking a match against the wall of a house and lighting a cigarette.
The officer protested, “Madame, you mustn’t! What would Alderman Sullivan say?”
“But I am,” Mulcahey replied, “and don’t know.”
In night court she stated her views to the judge, who was, of course, a man: “I’ve got as much right to smoke as you have. never heard of this new law, and don’t want to hear about it. No man shall dictate to me.”
The shameless hussy was found guilty and fined $5.00 but she refused to pay and was thrown in jail for her impudence.
The Sullivan Act lasted only two weeks before being vetoed by Mayor George McClellan. Smoking attracted women as a symbol of liberation and sophistication, especially in the post-World War I period. Here is a picture of my parents in the late 1940s. What makes my mother’s cigarette addiction so important is that she was a recovering tuberculosis patient with only one lung.
