Christmas Every Day

1548

Death of Catherine Parr, last of the wives of Henry VIII. Catherine, already twice a widow, married Henry in 1543. Her Protestant inclinations clashed with the erratic Henry’s caesaropapalism and placed her in danger from Catholic forces at the English court. She was not able to openly show her religious sympathies but she was an effective regent when Henry went to war in France and reconciled him to the two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth,whom  he had legally bastardized. Within months of the king’s death in 1547 she secretly married Thomas Seymour, brother of the Lord Protector. For a time she provided a Protestant upbringing for Princess Elizabeth and her cousin Lady Jane Grey. Her death was likely a result of complications following the birth of her only child, Mary. Her books Psalms or Prayers (1544), Prayers and Meditations (1546) and The Lamentations of a Sinner (1548) show her deep spirituality.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Mother Teresa (1910-97), as she was known to billions, was born in the Macedonian area of the Turkish Empire as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the daughter of ethnic Albanians. As a teenager she joined the Sisters of Loreto, an order of nuns who carried out missionary work in India. After going to Ireland to learn English, the language in which the Sisters taught in their schools in India, she travelled to the subcontinent where she finalized her vows and adopted the name of Teresa, after St Theresa of Lisieux. She taught at a convent school in Calcutta for twenty years before receiving a divine call to work more directly amongst the poor.

In 1950 she founded a new order, the Missionaries of Charity, which opened a hospice for the dying, a leprosarium, a school, and an orphanage. As more Sisters joined the operations grew to include more facilities serving orphans, AIDS victims, refugees, alcoholics and the elderly. The Order expanded to other cities in India and then around the world, serving the poor in the distinctive blue-bordered habits designed to resemble saris. At the time of her death in 1997 her organization ran 610 missions in 123 countries.

Mother Teresa received the Noble Peace Prize and many other humanitarian awards but she also came in for more than her share of criticism. Her uncompromising opposition to abortion caused irritation on the Left; her Catholicism irritated the Hindu Right; atheist Christopher Hitchens accused her of hypocrisy and of taking donations from dictators and criminals. In 2016 the Catholic Church declared her sainthood.

Augustine of Hippo

Why is the greatest saint of the ancient world the patron of brewers?

Aurelius Augustinus was born in present-day Algeria in 354, when the region was one of the most prosperous in a revitalized, Christian Roman Empire. His mother Monica was a Christian but his father Patricius, a respectable civil servant, was a pagan. Augustine was educated in the faith but rejected it when he went in his teens to Carthage to study rhetoric. There he indulged himself in riotous living, (thus the patronage of brewers), became a Manichaean — a follower of the popular dualist philosophy that had arrived from Persia — and took a concubine who would bear him a son. He taught rhetoric at Carthage before moving to Rome in 383. Augustine had abandoned Manichaean ideas by this time, unsatisfied with the answers they provided, and in Italy became a devotee of Platonism. In 384 he headed north to the imperial capital of Milan where he had won a coveted chair in rhetoric; there he fell under the spell of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, a towering intellect and preacher. Influenced by Ambrose and the incessant pleadings of his mother Monica, Augustine became more interested in Christianity. His conversion was famously prompted by hearing a child-like voice speak to him in a moment of spiritual anguish. In his autobiography The Confessions, he said:

I cast myself down I know not how, under a certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears; and the floods of mine eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to Thee. And, not indeed in these words, yet to this purpose, spake I much unto Thee: and Thou, O Lord, how long? how long, Lord, wilt Thou be angry, for ever? Remember not our former iniquities, for I felt that I was held by them. I sent up these sorrowful words: How long, how long, “tomorrow, and tomorrow?” Why not now? why not is there this hour an end to my uncleanness?

So was I speaking and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating. ‘Take up and read; Take up and read.’ [’Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege!’] Instantly, my countenance altered, I began to think most intently whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words: nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find…

Eagerly then I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence. I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell: ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence.’ [Romans 13:14-15] No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.

After he and his son were baptized by Ambrose, he returned to Africa. He might have lived the quiet life of a prosperous provincial citizen but he reluctantly agreed to become a priest and then bishop of the city of Hippo Regius. There he dispensed justice (bishops were considered part of the Roman administrative and legal system), tended his spiritual flock, engaged in theological controversies, preached, and wrote ceaselessly. In addition to the Confessions, a landmark in the development of autobiography, he produced The City of God, which presented a Christian view of history and God’s role in it; De Libero Arbitrio, against Manichaeanism; De Baptismo contra Donatistas, against a schismatic North African sect; and De Gratiâ Christi et de peccato originali, against the Pelagian heresy. His writings on  predestination, free will, millenialism, creationism, and just war have provided the backbone for Christian theology over the last 1500 years. Augustine died in 430 while Hippo was being besieged by the barbarian Vandals. His relics have been moved a number of times and now rest in Pavia, in northern Italy.

In addition to brewers, he is the patron saint of printers, theologians, spiritual seekers and those with failing eyesight.

1270

St Louis Dies on Crusade

Louis IX was one of the most remarkable of French kings and the only one to be considered a saint. His medieval reputation was enormous, spreading even to the New World with French explorers who named a settlement on the banks of the Mississippi after him.

Louis became king at the age of 12 upon the death of his father, Louis VIII. (Why French royal families are so unimaginative with their names is a mystery; there would be 18 kings named Louis and 10 named Charles. None would be named Gerry.) His deeply-religious mother Blanche of Castile served as regent until he came of age. Her piety and Catholic zeal also infused her son who vowed to live up to the title of “most Christian king”, a name attached to French rulers by the papacy. After his accession to full power in 1234, he decreed a number of laws against moral crimes such as usury, prostitution, and blasphemy and acted against his country’s Jews. Louis purchased a number of relics from the financially-strapped Byzantine emperor, including the Crown of Thorns and a piece of the True Cross, which he housed in the gloriously Gothic Sainte-Chappelle church which he commissioned. His charity was legendary; he washed the feet of beggars and established hospitals, leprosaria and asylums across France.

While his domestic policies were successful, Louis’ involvement in crusading was disastrous. In 1249 he launched the Seventh Crusade, attacking the Muslim strongholds of the Ayyubid dynasty  in Egypt. His troops were successful on the coast in capturing the city of Damietta but their attempt to penetrate inland toward Cairo was thwarted at the Battle of Fariskur where Louis, his brothers and a host of French nobles were captured. After paying an enormous ransom, Louis was freed but he chose not to return to France. Instead he became a pilgrim, visiting holy sites in Jerusalem, and aiding the few remaining crusader holdings along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean. Undaunted by his failure in Egypt, Louis undertook the Eighth Crusade, this time targeted against Tunis. In 1270 his fleet landed at Carthage where his camp was soon swept by a plague of dysentery which carried off Louis and many of his men. His body was boiled and the bones and heart were sent back to France where he was interred among the tombs of his ancestors at St Denis.

Louis was canonized in 1297; he is the patron saint of Québec, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Versailles. He may be invoked by barbers, crusaders, kings, stone masons, parents of large families and those with difficult marriages.

St Helena

The conversion of the pagan Roman Empire to Christianity is one of the most interesting and consequential tales in history and part of it can be explained by the politics of marriage and succession.

In the third century the Empire was wracked by constant civil war with dozens of generals using their armies to attain the throne and killing more of their own citizens than barbarian enemies who were threatening the borders. To solve this problem, the soldier-emperor Diocletian (244-311) divided the empire into East and West, each to be ruled by an Augustus; he was Augustus of the East and his colleague Maximian became Augustus of the West. Each of the halves was further divided into two and a junior emperor or Caesar was appointed to share rule with the Augustus. This was known as the “rule of the four” or tetrarchy. Each had his own capital close to a threatened border (the city of Rome was now a political backwater). It was expected that in due time the Augustus would retire and appoint his Caesar in his place, thus ending the round of civil wars by providing an assured succession. To restore the good old days of the pagan Empire, a wide-spread persecution of Christians was ordered.

The Caesar in the West was Constantius Chlorus (250-306) who was less enthusiastic about persecuting the Christian church, possibly because his first wife (or concubine) was Helena, a Christian convert. Constantius had dumped Helena in 289 in order to make a politically-advantageous match with the daughter of Maximian but continued to favour their son Constantine. When Constantius died Constantine made a play for power and achieved supremacy in the West in 312 at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. He issued a decree of religious toleration and Helena was brought out of retirement and treated as an Augusta or Empress.

Her Christianity was evident in her lifestyle. She toured the Holy Land and identified a number of the sites associated with the life of Jesus, sites on which the government of Constantine built the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. She brought back to Italy pieces of the True Cross on which Jesus had been crucified, the rope which had bound him, His tunic, nails used in the crucifixion, and earth from Golgotha, as well as the bodies of the three Wise Men. She is considered a saint in both the Eastern and Western Churches, the patron of archaeologists, difficult marriages, the divorced and nail-makers. Though she was buried in Rome, parts of her body were stolen by a devoted French monk in 840. After several other adventures this bit was entrusted to the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre and installed in their church, Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles. These days, most Catholics in Paris have forgotten about the relics but they continue to be venerated by the Russian Orthodox community. Her head somehow managed to end up in a reliquary in Triers.

1941

Death of a voluntary martyr

The German-Soviet conquest of Poland in the fall of 1939 was meant not just to occupy the country but to eradicate it. “All Poles,” said Hitler, “will disappear from the world.” Both the Nazi occupation forces and the Red Army immediately set about to destroy the Polish human infrastructure, murdering the officer class, the intellectuals and professionals or interning them in concentration camps. Clergy were a particular target: thousands of priests, monks, nuns, and seminarians were murdered. To the camp at Auschwitz in 1941 was sent Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a Franciscan friar.

Kolbe was born in 1894 when most of Poland was still part of the Russian empire. He joined the Franciscans at an early age and received an excellent education in Rome where he earned doctorates in both philosophy and theology. He became a priest in 1919 and returned to the newly-independent Polish Republic where he founded a monastery and operated a religious publishing house. In the 1930s he was sent on mission to Asia where he succeeded in opening a monastery in Nagasaki, Japan.

Kolbe was arrested briefly after the German invasion. He refused to be granted protected status which his German ancestry could have won him but instead operated a hospital and refuge in his monastery, sheltering many, including over a thousand Jews. He continued his printing operation whose anti-German publications resulted in his arrest by the Gestapo and his internment in Auschwitz.

At the end of July, three prisoners from Kolbe’s block escaped and, as was the custom, ten other prisoners were selected to be executed in reprisal. One of those whose names were called out was Sergeant Franciszek Gajowniczek who cried out, “My wife! My children!” On hearing this, Kolbe stepped forward and told the SS captain: “I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.” He was granted his wish and with nine other condemned was sent to an underground cell where they were to be starved to death. According to the German guards, Kolbe’s behaviour was inspiring, leading his fellow prisoners in hymns and prayers and preserving their dignity until one by one they died, leaving only him alive. At this point the Germans decided they needed the cell and finished Kolbe off with a lethal injection.

Gajowniczek survived Auschwitz and another concentration camp, living out the war behind wire until the Red Army drove the Germans from Poland. He never ceased speaking of the man who had exchanged his own life for his. Soon miraculous healings were attributed to Kolbe’s heavenly intercession. In 1982 John Paul II, the first Polish pope, declared Kolbe a saint.  He is considered to be the patron of drug addicts, political prisoners, families, journalists, and the pro-life movement.

St Peter In Chains

Peter thus was being kept in prison, but prayer by the church was fervently being made to God on his behalf. On the very night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter, secured by double chains, was sleeping between two soldiers, while outside the door guards kept watch on the prison. Suddenly the angel of the Lord stood by him and a light shone in the cell. He tapped Peter on the side and awakened him, saying, “Get up quickly.” The chains fell from his wrists. The angel said to him, “Put on your belt and your sandals.” He did so. Then he said to him, “Put on your cloak and follow me.” So he followed him out, not realizing that what was happening through the angel was real; he thought he was seeing a vision. They passed the first guard, then the second, and came to the iron gate leading out to the city, which opened for them by itself. They emerged and made their way down an alley, and suddenly the angel left him. (Acts 12)

The Feast of St Peter in Chains commemorating the Apostle Peter’s miraculous liberation from prison was first celebrated in the church in Rome named after him in the fifth century. The church known as St Peter ad Vincula contains not only the chains that bound him in the Holy Land but also those placed on him in the Mamertine prison during the reign of Nero. Around the year 450 Pope Leo the Great had these two chains united.

A number of churches in Christendom have also taken that name. In the Tower of London is a chapel known as the Church of St Peter ad Vincula. There are buried many victims of of Henry VIII who were executed in the Tower precincts: two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard; his chief minister Thomas Cromwell; Catholic martyrs, Sir Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher. There are also the remains of those killed by Henry’s daughter, Mary: Lady Jane Grey and her husband Guildford Dudley; John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. The 19th-century English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay said of the chapel:

In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts.

1419

600th Anniversary of the First Defenestration of Prague

To defenestrate is to throw something out the window. Czech history gives us several examples of people being thrown out of windows, the earliest of these occurring on 30 July 1419.

The Czech lands were in religious turmoil early in the fifteenth century. Proto-protestant doctrines of John Wycliffe had been imported from England and aroused unhappiness with the state of the Church. As expounded by preacher Jan Hus these new ideas also took on a nationalistic gloss, setting Czech sentiments against a perceived Germanic dominance in politics and culture. When Hus was burnt in 1415 by the Council of Constance, despite an imperial safe-conduct, talk of violence became more common.

In July 1419 the Prague city council had arrested some Hussites and refused to give them up to a mob demanding their release. Led by radical priest Jan Želivský, the crowd stormed the Town Hall and threw a judge, a burgomaster, and several councillors out the window. Those who survived the fall were killed by the Hussite mob below. This is often identified as the first act in what became known as the Hussite Rebellion, a religious civil war that lasted into the 1430s.

Other defenestrations at the Town Hall occurred in 1483 and 1618. In 1948 Czechoslovakian foreign minister Jan Masaryk was assassinated by being thrown out of the window of a government building.

The Czechs made a 2019 festival out of the 600th anniversary with medieval jousts, a Hussite camp, a play, and a councillor being thrown out of a window.

1540

Thomas Cromwell is executed

Fans of “Wolf Hall” will be well acquainted with the career of Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), the low-born administrator who rose to be Earl of Essex and Henry VIII’s right-hand man. He was a leading figure in the break of the Church of England with Rome, taking steps that led historians to term him a secret Protestant sympathizer.

The son of a Surrey merchant, Cromwell may have spent time as a mercenary soldier on the Continent before becoming a lawyer and merchant. He entered politics in the 1520s and sat as a Member of Parliament, serving the interests of his patron Cardinal Wolsey, the Chancellor. He survived Wolsey’s fall; Henry VIII had noticed his talents and gave him ever greater responsibilities in the 1530s. He helped engineer the divorce of Katharine of Aragon, the fall of Sir Thomas More, the break with Rome, the Royal Supremacy and Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn. He did not get on well with the new Queen; Anne attacked him publicly. When she could not produce the male heir Henry desired, Cromwell led the attack on her that resulted in her execution.

Though Henry remained a doctrinal Catholic all his life (save for replacing the pope with himself as head of the English Church), he allowed Cromwell to proceed with three projects that might be seen to advance the cause of Protestantism. The first was the Suppression of the Monasteries which saw the abolition of the monastic system and the seizure of vast church wealth and lands by the crown. The second was the production of an English-language Bible (with a full-page portrait of the king at the front) and the third was a marriage to a Protestant princess. This last move proved fatal to Cromwell.

Henry was finally given his long-sought male heir with the birth of Prince Edward in 1537 by third wife Jane Seymour. Jane had died soon after and Cromwell sought a wife for Henry who might bring the support of Protestant princes on the Continent. The choice fell on German noblewoman Anne of Cleves but the king was so repelled by her in person that a divorce was quickly undertaken. Cromwell’s Catholic enemies at court used this opportunity to poison Henry’s ear against his chief advisor. The iron rule of Henrician politics, as learned by Wolsey, Queen Anne and Sir Thomas More, was that failure meant death. Cromwell went to the block in 1540 though Henry was later said to have lamented that “he had put to death the most faithful servant he ever had”.

1164 

The Magi are moved

The unnumbered and unnamed magoi or “wise men” who visited the baby Jesus and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, disappear from Scripture after they are warned in a dream not to report to Herod but to return to their own country by a different way. After centuries of imaginative story telling about their deeds, we learn that the Magi numbered three and were called Balthazar, Melchior and Kaspar (or Gaspar) — they represented the three ages of man (young, middle-aged and elderly) and came from the three continents (Africa, Asia and Europe). They became Christians and according to legend met one last time whereupon they died and were buried, miraculously retaining the appearance they showed at the time of the Nativity. Their remains were discovered by the mother of the emperor Constantine, St Helena, who moved them to Constantinople; from there they went to Milan, an imperial capital. When the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa conquered that city he had the bodies “translated” to Cologne Cathedral. Observers noted that the bodies, wrapped in silk and embalmed with balsam and other spices, were uncorrupt and appeared to be men aged 15, 30 and 60 years old. “And all the people of the country roundabout, with all the reverence they might, received these relics, and there in the city of Cologne they are kept and beholden of all manner of nations unto this day.”

To this day one of the treasures of Cologne cathedral is the largest reliquary in western Christendom, the sarcophagus that holds the bodies of the Magi. It is constructed of gold, silver, enamel and jewels and is built to resemble three joined basilicas. When it was opened in 1864 on the 700th anniversary of the translation, it was found to contain the bodies of three men — an adolescent, a man of middle years and an older man. In 2004, the skulls, each wearing a gold crown, were examined by a scientific team who confirmed the relative ages of the bones.

1304

Death of a poisoned pope

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Church’s greatest concern was its relationship to the secular powers, particularly the increasingly important national monarchies of western Europe. Most troublesome from a papal point of view were Philip IV (“the Fair”) of France and Edward I (“Longshanks”) of England. Both had tried to tax the Church in their lands and both had run up against scoldings from Pope Boniface VIII who went so far as to threaten both with excommunication. In 1302 Boniface laid down the law to European rulers in no uncertain terms; his bull Unam Sanctam declared that kings should kiss the feet of the pope who was the agent of God on Earth — he who resisted the pope resisted God. Philip replied by sent a raiding force to Italy under the command of Guillaume de Nogaret who had orders to kidnap Boniface and bring him back to France for trial. The expedition captured and roughed up the pope but Boniface was rescued by angry locals. Boniface died shortly thereafter, out of shame and anger it was said.

At a conclave in Rome in October 1303, Italian cardinal Nicola Boccasini was elected pope, taking the name of Benedict XI. A Dominican professor of theology and diplomat, Benedict was chosen largely because he was not seen as overtly hostile to the French. He proved this by rescinding Boniface’s bull Unam Sanctam but he proved obdurate in his dealings with de Nogaret, refusing to back down from a sentence of excommunication on the man who had dared lay his hands on his papal predecessor. After a short reign of eight months Benedict died suddenly and fingers were immediately pointed at de Nogaret who was accused of poisoning the pope. Certainly the French benefited from Benedict’s death. The next pope was a French puppet who cooperated in the move of the papacy from Rome to southern France, the so-called Babylonian Captivity of the Church.