Christmas Every Day

The Jonestown Massacre. Jim Jones (b. 1931) was a charismatic American cult leader, founder of the Peoples Temple and instigator of a hideous mass suicide. A devotee of Marxism, Jones viewed Christianity as a way to spread the communist gospel. His advanced views on racial integration won him considerable support in political circles and a multi-racial church following.

After moving his church from Indiana to California in the 1960s, Jones established a number of Peoples Temples across the state. His ability to mobilize black voters for Democratic candidates led to commendations from Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter and Harvey Milk but his disenchantment with orthodox Christianity was becoming more open. When news of his sexual and physical abuse of congregation members was about to be exposed Jones moved hundreds of his followers to “Jonestown”, a farm commune the Temple had established in Guyana.

Relatives of Temple members bombarded the American government with tales of kidnapped and maltreated inhabitants of Jonestown. In November 1978 Congressman Leo Ryan and an NBC News crew visited the site to investigate and to take back any Temple members who wished to return to the United States. They and the defectors were gunned down at an airfield by men loyal to Jones. Later that day, drug-addled and paranoid Jones convinced hundreds of Temple members to kill their children and commit “revolutionary suicide”, telling them that they would soon be attacked and tortured by outside forces. 909 bodies were found in Jonestown, including that of Jim Jones.

1940

The destruction of Coventry Cathedral.

In the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe, the German airforce, began the Battle of Britain, wave after wave of attacks designed to eliminate the Royal Air Force, as a necessary prelude to a sea-borne invasion of England. By the autumn of that year the Germans had decided that they had failed in their plans and abandoned the notion of a cross-Channel incursion. The Luftwaffe was directed instead to concentrate on bombing British cities to destroy their enemy’s industrial capacity: this made Coventry, with its many armament plants, a logical target.

On the night of November 14 the Germans launched Operation Moonlight Sonata, an attack of 515 bombers dropping 500 tonnes of high explosive and 36,000 incendiary devices. Two-thirds of the city’s factories were hit, at least 500 people were killed, thousands were rendered homeless and St Michael’s Cathedral, a tall Gothic building dating from the 1300s was almost entirely obliterated. The lesson the British earned from this was that such bombing of urban areas could be effective and it justified the massive retaliation they and the American airforce would deal out to German cities in the coming years.

In the post-war years it was suggested that Winston Churchill had been alerted to the raid on Coventry by decoded Enigma signals but chose to give no warning to the city lest the Germans realized the secrecy of their code machines had been compromised. This seems not to have been the case and the British had no warning of the attacks to come.

The grand Gothic building was never rebuilt and a new modern edifice was erected on the spot. This sculpture of St Michael overcoming the Devil is on the outside of the new cathedral.

1554

The English Church returns to Roman Catholicism. The reign of Henry VIII (d. 1547) had seen the Church of England leave the obedience of Rome, though retaining most Catholic doctrine. His young son Edward VI (r. 1547-53) had decreed a full-blown Protestant church with a new Prayer Book, vernacular services and married clergy. His death brought to the throne his half-sister Mary I who had clung to her Catholicism and who was determined to see her church return to Rome. Because the Henrician reformation had distributed church lands to the nobility, Mary had to proceed carefully. In November 1554, with her marriage to a Spanish Catholic prince and the pope’s agreement that the return of church lands was not necessary, her Parliament passed the Second Act of Repeal. The House of Lords and the House of Commons declared themselves “very sorry for the schism and disobedience committed in this realm . . . against the See Apostolic” and they sought “as children repentant to be received into the bosom and unity of Christ’s Church.” All the antipapal legislation passed since 1529 was repealed and the old treason and heresy laws were revived. Within a few months the Marian government had started burning stubborn Protestants and earning the queen her sobriquet of “Bloody” Mary. Historians have argued ever since whether Roman Catholicism could have ever been successfully reimplanted into the English character had the queen lived longer than she did (d. 1558). In any event the succession of her half-sister Elizabeth would lead to a return to Protestantism and an Anglican Church.

Feast Day of St Martin of Tours

St Martin, born c. 316, was a Christian soldier in the army of the Roman Empire, known for his charity. He is famous for having cut his military cloak in half to share with a freezing beggar. After leaving the army he became a hermit in Gaul but was compelled by townsfolk in Tours to become the local bishop. He evangelized widely and established a monastery where monks would later develop the handwriting known as Carolingian miniscule, a wonderfully readable improvement on earlier hands. St Martin’s burial site drew thousands of pilgrims and became a rich shrine, the target of a Muslim raid from Spain in 732. Because of his cloak, he is the patron saint of tailors; because cackling geese gave him away when he attempted to hide from the summons to be a bishop, goose is traditionally eaten on his feast. His cult was always favoured by the French monarchy and so he is also a patron of France.

1918

The end of World War I, the worst armed conflict in human history to that time. Even in its early stages there were strong religious motivations for the war with each side claiming divine sanction. German equipment carried the motto “Gott Mit Uns”; the Turkish emperor in his role as Caliph declared the war a jihad and called on Muslims in the French, British and Russian empires to rise up against their rulers; Russians declared that the German Kaiser was the Antichrist; evangelist Billy Sunday characterized the war as “Germany against America, hell against heaven.” Millions of troops in every army believed themselves to be crusaders of a sort. The war was conducted savagely, destroying countless churches – the ruin of the great Gothic cathedral in Ypres became a symbol of the horror of the Western Front. It did not spare the noncombatant; France alone lost 5,000 military chaplains in the fighting; Belgian and Russian nuns were raped; Cossacks pillaged villages on the Eastern Front; Armenian Christians suffered a genocide at the hands of the Turkish army. Religions seemed capable of supporting the violence but not restraining it. The religious consequences of the war were profound. It led to the Russian Revolution which gutted the Orthodox Church and instituted an atheist regime; the defeat of the Ottoman Empire led to the destruction of the Caliphate; hideous new secular faiths such as fascism and Bolshevism replaced Christianity in the hearts of many disillusioned veterans.

1871

An expedition led by journalist Henry Stanley discovers the long-lost missionary David Livingstone. Livingstone had gone as an evangelist to Africa in the 1850s and though he was unsuccessful at converting the native inhabitants his reports back to Britain were widely-read. His stories of his endless travels and the evils of the Arab slave trade made him a hero in the English-speaking world. He disappeared from sight in 1866, supposedly searching for the headwaters of the Nile. When nothing had been heard from him for years the New York Herald sent Stanley to find him. Stanley’s own expedition into the interior was perilous but he eventually reached the missionary in what is now Tanzania. His first words to his quarry became famous: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley went on to a life of continuous adventure, eventually discovering the sources of the Nile and winning a knighthood; Livingstone died of malaria in 1873 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

680

The Sixth Ecumenical Council (or the Third Council of Constantinople) opens with representatives from eastern and western churches debating the problem of Christ’s nature. Many of the Christian lands recently conquered by Islamic armies held to Monophysitism, a belief that Christ possessed a single divine nature. This had been declared a heresy in Rome and Constantinople and compromise positions had tried to bridge the gap: monothelitism (Christ had but a single will) and monoenergism (Christ had but one energy.) The Council dismissed those attempts and ruled that Christ possessed two energies and two wills but that the human will was “in subjection to his divine and all-powerful will.”

1811

He cured disease, saw the future, sundered curses, instilled visions, and passed into other realms. He felt the presence of witches and other agents of evil spirits hiding among the people. His powers were earthly signs of his profound connection to the divine. His followers stretched from the Appalachian foothills to the source of the Mississippi, and they thought he could change the world. (The Gods of Prophetstown, Adam Jortner)

Native tribes under Tenkswatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, are defeated by an American force at the Battle of Tippecanoe. The Prophet had tried to revitalize native spirituality as a way of uniting tribes against the expansion of the United States into the interior of the continent but the defeat at Tippecanoe discredited him.

1917

Russian Bolsheviks launch their revolution that would bring down the fledgling democracy formed earlier in the year. The resulting civil war and seventy years of Communist rule brought oppression and terror to Russian Christianity. The Soviet government was avowedly atheist and supported an anti-religious campaign led by the League of the Militant Godless. Thousands of priests and monks of the Orthodox Church were murdered; tens of thousands more were exiled to the gulags. Similar persecutions were carried out against Protestant denominations and Islamic clerics. Of this campaign Vladimir Lenin said, “The bigger the number of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeois we manage to shoot in the process, the better.”

On this date the Anglican Communion honours the memory of William Temple (1881-1944), Archbishop of Canterbury.

The son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple studied the classics at Oxford and began his career as a philosophy teacher before turning toward a life as a clergyman. Recognized now as one of the pillars of Anglican theological thinking, Temple was, at first, denied admission to studies for the priesthood because he confessed that his belief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were shaky. He rose quickly in the clerical ranks, becoming first Bishop of Manchester, then Archbishop of York by 1929. He had a glowing reputation as a philosopher and as a proponent of Jewish-Christian reconciliation. Temple’s thinking focussed on the creation of a just social order and he was sympathetic to working-class movements.

Temple was named Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 when Britain was engaged in the Second World War. He supported the bombing campaign of the RAF directed against German cities but was also in favour of a negotiated peace rather than the unconditional surrender which the Allies were demanding. Temple died in 1944, the last Archbishop of Canterbury to die in office.

A man so broad, to some he seem’d to be
Not one, but all Mankind in Effigy.
Who, brisk in Term, a Whirlwind in the Long,
Did everything by turns, and nothing wrong.
Bill’d at each Lecture-Hall from Thames to Tyne,
As Thinker, Usher, Statesman, or Divine.

All Saints’ Day

All Saint’s Day, All Hallow’s Day, or Hallowmas is a commemoration of all of those who are part of the heavenly communion of saints. Though it was customary since the days of early Christianity to honour martyrs on the anniversary of their death, a day to remember all saints seems to have begun in the West after the dedication of the old pagan temple, the Pantheon, as the Church of St Mary and the Martyrs. However,  the date of November 1 was the decision of Pope Gregory III in the 730s. (Some historians have tried to link this tradition to similar pagan days to honour the dead such as the Celtic Samhain.)

The Catholic Church takes the word “saint” to be less inclusive than Protestants for whom the term takes in all the faithful dead. For the latter, November 1 is a day to remember family and congregational members who have passed away and in many Christian cultures it is a time to visit cemeteries, tidy up grave sites, and light candles.

899 Death of Alfred the Great

The only British king ever to be called “the Great” Alfred was born in 849 into the royal family of Wessex which ruled parts of southern England. As the fourth son of King Aethelwulf, Alfred was not expected to ascend the throne; he appears to have been a sickly child with a penchant for learning that was uncommon in Anglo-Saxon noblemen of the time. Unfortunately for Wessex, the king and his three oldest sons Aethelbald, Aethelred and Aethelberht all died in a short span which coincided with the invasion of England by the Great Heathen Army, a Scandinavian alliance bent on conquering the island.  Alfred became king at age 22 when most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been gobbled up by the Vikings. For seven years Alfred battled the invaders when he could and bribed them to stay away from Wessex when he had to, but in 878 a surprise winter attack by a Danish force compelled Alfred to flee and take refuge in the marsh country. Later that year Alfred gathered an army and smashed the Danes who were obliged to withdraw and agree to the conversion of their leadership to Christianity. Despite this victory, Alfred would spend the rest of his life battling one set of Vikings or another, slowly driving them north.

To enable the English to resist the invaders Alfred built a series of forts called burhs to which his people could resort with their property and cattle, thus denying the Vikings the ability to live off the land. He also divided the men of his kingdom in two, with each half taking turns serving in the army and working the land. Alfred is considered the father of the Royal Navy, having commissioned large ships to intercept the invaders at sea.

Alfred was more than just a successful warrior. He was a legal reformer, organizing an efficient system of taxation and maintenance of infrastructure. Anglo-Saxon England would become a model of medieval statecraft because of Alfred’s efforts. He was also committed to an active and effective religious life for his nation; like Charlemagne earlier in the century he saw church and state functioning together as a Christian commonwealth. Alfred refounded monasteries, took care in the appointment of bishops, imported foreign clergy, communicated regularly with the papacy and established schools. He took part in the translation of St Gregory’s book on pastoral care, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and St Augustine’s Soliloquies. He ordered that the works of Gregory, Boethius and the History of the Church in England by the Venerable Bede be acquired by every English church.

Attempts by English kings to have Alfred canonized were not successful but he is honoured on this day by churches of the Anglican communion.

1844 Birth of Louis Riel

Louis David Riel (1844-85) is widely recognized as a political leader of the Metis people of western Canada, a founding father of the province of Manitoba and leader of two rebellions. Less well-known are his messianic claims and his desires to change the Roman Catholic Church.

Riel was born into a prominent Metis family in the Red River Valley which at that time was claimed by the Hudsons’s Bay Company. He showed intellectual promise at an early age and was sent to Montreal to be trained for the Catholic priesthood but his father’s death, a broken romance and the first signs of incipient mental instability caused him to abandon Montreal for the United States and eventually a return to Manitoba in 1868.

The newly independent nation of Canada was arranging to acquire the vast land claims of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a move that caused unease in the Red River where inhabitants feared for their traditional holdings. A Canadian attempt to survey the territory in 1869 was met with local resistance led by Louis Riel who declared that no takeover of the area would be allowed unless the inhabitants were consulted. He was named head of a Provisional Government, dominated by Metis, and opposed by many recent settlers, mainly white Protestants. When fighting broke out between these two groups Riel had a number of his opponents arrested and executed one of them, Thomas Scott. Though the Canadian government agreed to the creation of a province of Manitoba, Riel fled the approach of an army expedition, fearing he would be punished for Scott’s death. Riel was eventually bribed with cash and an amnesty into accepting a five-year exile from Canada; he was denied the right to take up the seat in the House of Commons to which he had been elected several times.

In 1876 Riel’s mental troubles increased; he seems to have begun entertaining notions of a divinely-appointed role for himself — he signed himself “Prophet, Infallible Pontiff and Priest-King” — and was confined to an asylum for two years. On his release he journeyed to the American West where he settled in Montana, became a U.S. citizen and married. In 1884 he was summoned back to Canada by a delegation of Metis and white settlers in what is now Saskatchewan to help present their grievances to the Canadian government. Ottawa agreed to set up a commission to consider those complaints but Riel and some Metis considered this merely a delaying tactic.

Riel was by now convinced that he had been chosen by God to lead his people and began advancing wild religious views. He called himself the “Prophet of the New World”. The papacy, he said, should be moved to Montreal; Bishop Ignace Bourget of that city should become the pope (later he claimed that the village of St Boniface would house the papacy and Bishop Taché would be pope). The sun, moon and planets should be renamed, often after his family members; the names of the days of the week were changed to eliminate their pagan origins. He advocated a return to many Old Testament practices, including circumcision, a married clergy and polygamy. When protest broke out into open warfare, Riel’s prophetic utterances were followed by his military leaders as orders coming from God, though such divine advice did the rebels no good. The Northwest Rebellion was crushed, Riel was arrested and sentenced to death in 1885. Before his execution he abjured his heretical beliefs and received the last rites of the Catholic Church.