Christmas Every Day

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.

1096 The End of the People’s Crusade

In 1095, Pope Urban II summoned the princes of Europe to form an army to journey to the eastern Mediterranean and do battle with Islamic armies threatening the Byzantine Empire and occupying the Holy Land. Thousands of nobles and knights heeded the call and took part in what is known as The First Crusade or the Princes’ Crusade. At the same, millennial crazes were obsessing the common people of western Christendom who felt that they too had a part to play in liberating Jerusalem. Listening to itinerant preachers such as Peter the Hermit, tens of thousands of ordinary folk, peasants, soldiers, minor nobility, men women and children formed into columns and set out for Constantinople.

On the way, the People’s Crusade proved to be an ungodly menace. They perpetrated anti-Semtic massacres in the Rhineland, extorted food and supplies from the towns they passed through and attacked Byzantine garrisons who were astonished at the arrival of these motley forces. In August 1096 perhaps as many as 30,000 of these folk, drawn from Germany, Italy and France, reached Constantinople. Emperor Alexius, who had no wish to see them linger and become a worse nuisance, arranged to have them ferried across to Asia Minor, which was largely in the hands of Turks. He cautioned them not to take on Muslim armies themselves but to await the arrival of the heavily-armed knights of the First Crusade.

Once in enemy territory the People’s Crusade broke up into quarrelling factions, some reluctant to advance further, some anxious to start the battles they had journeyed so long to fight. While Peter the Hermit was returning to Constantinople to arrange for more supplies the poorly-armed crusaders engaged in several battles and were routed by Turkish forces, particularly at the Battle of Civetot which turned into a massacre. Only a few thousand made it back to the safety of the Byzantine lines; fewer still would survive the rigours of the remaning campaigns and see victory at Jerusalem in 1099.

1939 Pope Pius XII attacks Nazi and Soviet war aims

Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli (1876-1958) was elected pope as Pius XII in 1939, having spent much of his ecclesiastical career as in the Church’s diplomatic service. He was well acquainted with Germany have negotiated with its imperial rulers, its democratic regime, and its Nazi officials — Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge which condemned Nazi policy was written by Pacelli. His election took place while peace was collapsing in Europe and Adolf Hitler was plotting a continent-wide war. In September 1939, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR collaborated to invade Poland and divide the conquered nation, an act which triggered World War II.

Summi Pontificatus was Pius XII’s first encyclical, appearing on this date in 1939. In it the pope notes the growing strength of the “host of Christ’s enemies” and the outbreak of war. These calamities he blamed on the denial and rejection of a universal norm of morality as well for individual and social life as for international relations; We mean the disregard, so common nowadays, and the forgetfulness of the natural law itself, which has its foundation in God, Almighty Creator and Father of all, supreme and absolute Lawgiver, all-wise and just Judge of human actions. When God is hated, every basis of morality is undermined; the voice of conscience is stilled or at any rate grows very faint, that voice which teaches even to the illiterate and to uncivilized tribes what is good and what is bad, what lawful, what forbidden, and makes men feel themselves responsible for their actions to a Supreme Judge.

Pius XII went on to condemn racism, totalitarianism and the rape of Poland. The Nazi government in Berlin recognized the encyclical as an attack on their policies; in neutral America, the New York Times praised the pope: A powerful attack on totalitarianism and the evils which he considers it has brought upon the world was made by Pope Pius XII in his first encyclical…It is Germany that stands condemned above any country or any movement in this encyclical-the Germany of Hitler and National Socialism. The French air force scattered copies of the bull over Germany.

Saint Edwin of Northumbria

Born a pagan, Edwin (585-633) became a Christian saint, the father of two saints, and the great-uncle and grandfather of two more saints.

The political life of early medieval Britain was brutal, resembling in many ways A Game of Thrones, though with, perhaps, slightly less sex and no dragons. A number of minor, pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms continually struggled against each other, against native Christian enclaves and against raiders from Ireland and Caledonia. These statelets rose and fell, occasionally producing a ruler who was strong enough to dominate his neighbours for a time and earn the title of Bretwalda or High King. One of these was a northern prince named Edwin of Northumbria.

Edwin appeared at a time when Christian missions were penetrating these pagan Germanic territories from the north, where Irish-trained monks brought a Celtic Christianity and from the south, where missionaries had been sent from Catholic Rome. In 627, under the influence of Catholic bishop Paulinus, Edwin agreed to convert from his pagan upbringing. Bede’s history tells us that the king and his nobles debated the opportunity of becoming Christians, with the speech of one of his men being decisive:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately out another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

Edwin’s conversion and his domination of northern England aroused enemies, particularly the very able and aggressive Penda, the pagan king of Mercia. In 633 Penda defeated Edwin, killing him and his two sons. His Christian wife and Paulinus fled south and the Christian project in northern England suffered a temporary set-back.

732 Charles Martel drives back the Muslims from France

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammed.

This was the judgement of Charles Gibbons in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he considered the importance of the battle of Tours (aka Battle of Poitier) in 732, a battle that pitted the army of semi-civilized Christian Franks against the undefeated forces of Muslim Spain. The victory of warlord Charles “the Hammer” Martel repelled an Islamic incursion and marked the rollback of Muslim penetration into France and back over the Pyrenees.

Muslim armies had crossed over the Straits of Gibraltar in 711 and rapidly conquered the Visigothic kingdom in Spain, leaving only a remnant of Christian rule in the mountains of the northwest of the Iberian peninsula. They surged across the mountains and invaded the old Roman province of Aquitaine in southern Gaul where they occupied a number of cities and raided north into Burgundy. In 732 a large army, probably over 30,000 cavalrymen, led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi struck out toward the rich shrine of St Gregory at Tours. Their plan was plunder and destruction of the Frankish kingdom, then under the weak Merovingian dynasty.

The Frankish “mayor of the palace” (the brains behind the weak kings) was Charles Martel who gathered an army of Frankish fighters, spear, axe and shield men, who would meet the enemy on foot. The two armies clashed somewhere between what are now the cities of Tours and Poitiers. Charles arranged his men on high ground in an impregnable shield wall, impervious to cavalry, and waited for the Muslims, or Moors, to become impatient and charge too impetuously. That break came after at least three (perhaps seven) days of stand-off when the Moors launched their attack and were beaten with their general falling in battle. They fled south toward Spain, leaving their loot behind. In the following years Charles moved his army south and drove the Muslims back across the mountains in Spain.

Historians have debated the significance of the battle; many are not as sure as Gibbon that the 732 encounter was all that important. It is clear, however, that Charles’s victory led to his family’s ascending the throne of the Franks and the reign of his grandson Charlemagne who took the fight against the Moors into Spain itself.

The painting above is a massive (4.6 m [15.2 ft] x 5.4 m [17.7 ft]) 1837 depiction, less accurate than allegorical — note the stone cross, and the imperilled woman and child.

935 The murder of “Good King Wenceslas”

The Czechs know him as Vaclav, their patron saint, and process with his skull on this day; English-speakers believe he was a king and sing about him on the day after Christmas. Wenceslas (908-935) was Duke of Bohemia at a time when his nation was pressured by pagan Magyar invaders from the east and expanding German rulers in the west who often levied tribute from the Czechs. Bohemia had been evangelized and partially converted to Christianity but powerful pagan factions held out. Court politics were particularly brutal. Wenceslas’s mother had ordered his grandmother, St Ludmilla, strangled and when he reached the age of majority Wenceslas exiled his mother.

On this date in 935 followers of his brother Boleslav stabbed Wenceslas on his way to church. It was once thought that Wenceslas, a pious Christian, was killed by Boleslav (nicknamed the Cruel) over religion but now his death is attributed to factional politics. Almost immediately after his murder a saintly cult grew up around the dead man, one which grew throughout the Middle Ages. Like Charlemagne to the French; Frederick Barbarossa to the Germans; Arthur to the English, and Sebastian to the Portuguese, Wenceslas is a Sleeping King — one who is not truly dead but only slumbers until his nation needs him.

“Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen” …. Though music critics have complained for over a century about the awkward combination of words and music, the St. Stephen’s Day carol by J.M. Neale has proven to be an enduring favourite. Neale’s words, written in 1853, about the tenth-century Bohemian duke were matched to a spring carol from the sixteenth-century collection Piae Cantiones with an 1871 arrangement by John Stainer. Why Neale should have chosen Wenceslas to embody the call to Christmas charity remains a mystery. Some claim that there was a long-standing legend about his generosity which English soldiers who fought during the Thirty Years War in Bohemia brought home, but, if there was, no trace of it remains. Neale would most likely have used “the feast of Stephen” because December 26 (St Stephen’s Day) was Boxing Day in England, a customary time for seasonal charity.

1555 The Peace of Augsburg

Martin Luther’s 1517 attack on the doctrine of Purgatory and indulgences did not result, as he had hoped, in a reform of Catholic church practices; instead it led to wide-spread schism, violence and open warfare. German territories were particularly hard-hit as the hundreds of minor states that made up the Holy Roman Empire coalesced into rival camps, some professing Lutheranism, some Catholicism, and some religiously neutral. When the Emperor Charles V decided to use the force of arms to defend Catholicism, Protestant princes formed the Schmalkaldic League for self-defence. Though Charles defeated the League, he could not enforce a religious settlement on Germany, harassed as he was by the French on his western border and the Turks to the east. Worn out by the struggle Charles decided to abdicate and spend his last years in retirement in Spain.

The vast Habsburg empire that Charles had ruled was split. His son, Philip, was given Spain, the Netherlands, parts of Italy, and overseas holdings in Africa, the Americas and Asia. His brother, Frederick, was given the German lands and the title of Emperor. Philip was determined that no heretic should survive in his realms and continued the policy of war and persecution. Frederick opted for a policy of toleration by separation as set out in the Peace of Augsburg, negotiated between the Lutheran princes and Charles, before his abdication.

The main principle of the Peace, which largely ended sectarian warfare in Germany for several generations, was cuius regio, eius religio, or “whose kingdom, his religion”. The prince of each territory (either Lutheran or Catholic only, no provision was made for Anabaptist or Calvinist options) would determine the religion of his subjects. Those who did not wish to live under such a regime were given five years to sell up and move to a more congenial location. Despite some local breakdowns, the Peace was largely observed until the eruption of the tragic Thirty Years War in 1618.

1122 An End to the Investiture Controversy

Like every long-enduring institution, the papacy has had its up and downs, with moments of greatness mixed with periods of lassitude or decline. Around the turn of the first millennium the office of the Bishop of Rome was in a sorry shape. The era of corruption known as the Pornocracy had seen the papacy in the hands of Roman gangs with the bastard teenage sons of harlots ascending the papal throne. Despite attempts at correction by the Cluniac movement and the German emperors, this corruption continued into the eleventh century with popes trying to sell their position and three men simultaneously claiming the See of Peter.

The papacy was finally set on the path of reform by Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor, who in 1049 sponsored Leo IX as pope. Leo and his successors set about to repair the damage of centuries – mandating clerical celibacy, banning absenteeism, pluralism and simony. The latter sin had been originally defined as the buying or selling of church offices but zealots now widened the term to include any kind of lay interference in the naming of abbots, bishops or popes, especially where the secular ruler invested the clergyman with the symbols of rank: the staff and ring. The College of Cardinals was established and henceforth it would be charged with naming popes. This spawned the Investiture Controversy, a struggle between lay and clerical spheres that broke out into open warfare. Popes were deposed and anti-popes named; emperors were deposed and rival claimants named.

The newly-reformed papacy was anxious to ensure that never again would local lords control the church; local rulers argued that these powerful church officials were also holders of feudal rights and vast land-holdings. As such they were political players who ought to be nominated by their kings or emperors. Though the most heated exchanges and open battles were in Germany and Italy, this was a crisis that occurred in many western European realms.

On this date in 1122, Pope Calixtus II and Emperor Henry V agreed to the Concordat of Worms, whereby secular rulers would cease their formal investing but retain considerable say in the appointment of church officers in their lands. The struggle between popes and emperors would continue, however, in other areas, to the detriment of both.

St Maurice and the Theban Legion

In 287, at Agaunum in the Swiss Alps, a strange massacre took place. It was the murder of a legion of Roman troops, recruited from Egypt, by their fellow soldiers.

St Maurice is said to have been born near Thebes on the Nile River in 250 and to have joined the Roman army. Despite his professed Christianity, he rose in the ranks and ended up in command of a legion, a unit of 6,000 men. In 287 under the command of Emperor Maximian he was ordered to sacrifice to the pagan gods and attack local Christians. He and his unit refused to do so, so they were subject to “decimation”, the execution of every tenth man. They remained steadfast and were eventually all killed.

The story of the Theban Legion and Maurice were extremely popular in the Middle Ages and for a thousand years his spurs and sword were used in the coronation of Holy Roman emperors. Maurice is portrayed in art as an African in armour, sometimes carrying a spear or a flag with a red cross. He is the patron saint of alpine troops, the pope’s Swiss Guards, infantrymen, weavers, dyers, cloth makers and swordsmiths and can be invoked by those suffering from cramp and gout.