Christmas Every Day

1610

Death of a Jesuit conspirator

During the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I, the open practice of Catholic worship was forbidden but its adherents were not seriously troubled by the state. The queen professed a desire not to “open a window into men’s hearts”; outward obedience to the Protestant settlement would keep Catholic families safe from persecution. This policy changed after 1569 when many Catholics were moved to rebellion, urged on by the papal decree “Regnans In Excelsis” and by Jesuit theorists who argued that it was a godly deed to assassinate a heretic queen. A number of murder plots were hatched by English Catholics who hoped that by killing Elizabeth a Catholic monarch could ascend the throne.

The chief theologian of assassination and rebellion in the English context was the Jesuit Robert Persons (1546-1610), an Oxford academic who fled England and joined the Society of Jesus. In 1580 he accompanied the soon-to-be-martyred Jesuit Edmund Campion in a secret mission to his home country. When Campion was arrested Persons slipped back to the Continent and spent the rest of his career trying to provoke and justify a Catholic invasion of England and Ireland. Among his more famous works were De persecutione Anglicana (1582), Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) and A Conference About the Next Succession (1594).

The efforts of Persons and Cardinal William Allen, the chief English Catholic in exile, were largely bent toward persuading King Philip II to launch the Spanish Armada against England in 1588. This invasion failed spectacularly and helped convince English Protestants that their Catholic countrymen were not to be trusted. Both Persons and Allen died in Rome without ever returning home.

1945

The execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Over the west door of Westminster Abbey is a series of ten sculptures: the Gallery of 20th Century Martyrs. They include  Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who gave his life to save a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz; Manche Masemola, a young South African girl murdered by her parents for converting to Christianity; Janani Luwum, the Ugandan Archbishop, assassinated on the orders of Idi Amin; Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, killed by the Bolsheviks; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Archbishop Oscar Romero; Esther John, a Pakistani nurse knifed to death for converting from Islam; Lucian Tapiedi, a New Guinea Anglican murdered by Japanese troops in World War II; and Wang Zhiming, a Chinese evangelist killed during the Cultural Revolution. In the middle of these statues stands one depicting Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German Protestant clergyman and theologian. He studied in Berlin and New York, receiving two doctorates before his ordination in 1931. He was teaching systematic theology at the University of Berlin when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Bonhoeffer revealed himself as a bold opponent of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler. He attacked the Führer on the radio and helped to establish the Confessing Church, an underground movement to counteract the official Nazi-oriented Church. The Nazis arrested his colleague Martin Niemoller, persecuted the Confessing Church and banned Bonhoeffer from living in the capital. For a time, he pastored in German-speaking churches in London and then ran clandestine ministerial training efforts back in Germany. When the war broke out he was studying in New York City. Friends congratulated him on being in a safe haven but the author of The Cost of Discipleship thought differently, saying: “Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security.” He returned to his homeland where he continued to be harassed by the authorities.

Hitler’s control of the German military was not a complete one; pockets of opposition to him lingered among the army, particularly among Christian officers. One such circle arranged for him to join the Abwehr, the army intelligence branch. As an agent he carried out secret anti-Nazi activities, helped German Jews escape and made contact with voices in the Allied countries. In 1943 he, his brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Hans von Donhanyi were arrested. Along with other plotters he was executed in the final weeks of the war.

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

St Isidore of Seville

Spain, in the seventh century, had been hit hard by the barbarian invasions that had ravaged western Europe. It had been swamped by the Vandal tribe, then the Alans and the Suevi, and finally by the Visigoths who drove out their Germanic rivals and established a kingdom in much of the Iberian peninsula. The destruction caused by these incursions and the primitive disunity into which the West had fallen had resulted in a loss of knowledge and higher culture. Isidore (560-636) set out to preserve what civilization remained in Spain.

He was born into a prominent family that produced bishops for the Catholic Church at a time when the ruling class of Visigoths were converting from Arianism but when the heresy still had a hold on many inhabitants. The Gothic habit of killing their kings for opposing the wishes of the nobility added further weakness and confusion. (These murders were so frequent that in the Middle Ages the term morbus Gothicus or “Gothic disease” became a jocular term for political assassination.) In this situation of shaky monarchy and religious division Catholic bishops became an important source of authority. As Bishop of Seville Isidore worked for improved clerical education, national unity and the spread of learning.

Isidore’s most memorable accomplishment was the compilation of the “Etymologiae”, the first Christian encyclopedia, an attempt to summarize and preserve all classical knowledge available to him. The rules of logic, the origins of words, descriptions of the animal kingdom, road-building techniques, geography, agriculture, war, textiles: all that and more found a place in his twenty volumes. He also wrote histories, theological works on the Trinity, apologetics, monastic regulation and allegorical biographies. His vast learning earned him the title of Doctor of the Church. Unfortunately, because of scribal errors, because so many works of science and philosophy had been lost and because of the disintegration of the Roman empire that kept Spain relatively isolated, much of what Isidore thought was true was not.

Recently a project has been launched to make Isidore the patron saint of the Internet, a fitting title because of the universal scope of his knowledge and the fact that so many of his assertions were unreliable.

1492

The expulsion of Spanish Jews begins

On January 6, 1492 the Reconquista came to an end. With the fall of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile had completed the 700-year battle to drive Islam from the Iberian peninsula. On March 31 of the same year a new kind of religious purification began — the two rulers issued the Alhambra Decree which forced the country’s Jews to choose between conversion to Christianity within four months or penniless expulsion. Most Spanish Jews chose to leave. Some fled to Portugal (though they were expelled from that country too before long) and some to North Africa. The Ottoman emperor Bayezid II sent ships to transport Jews and resettle them in his domain, mocking the Spanish king as one “who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!” The pope and a number of Italian city states also welcomed Jews to their territories. Bayezid’s assessment of the economic impact of the Spanish actions was correct: migrating Jews took valuable skills and connections with them to their new homes while the Spanish economy, despite the massive influx of gold and silver from the New World, stagnated.

Those Jews who chose to convert were never fully trusted by the Spanish authorities who feared (probably correctly) that their conversions were insincere and that these “New Christians” or “Marranos” were secret Judaizers. The Spanish Inquisition troubled the converso families for centuries as religious anti-Semitism morphed into racism. Anyone who could not prove that their ancestors had not married into a once-Jewish line were deemed to lack “purity of blood” and were kept from influence and high office. In the sixteenth century Spanish authorities turned on their Muslim subjects and on converts from Islam as well, driving them into exile or bloody rebellion.

Recently, the Catholic Church and the Spanish government have apologized to the descendants of these persecuted Jews. Spain has offered them automatic Spanish nationality without the requirement of residence in Spain.

1111

Death of a crusading prince

Bohemond of Taranto, prince of Antioch (1058-1111) was one of the leaders of the First Crusade and the founder of the principality of Antioch. Bohemond’s father was the notorious Robert Guiscard, a penniless Norman adventurer, who became first a bandit in southern Italy and then fought his way to a dukedom as a sworn vassal of the papacy. Normans in the 11th century had swarmed out of their French duchy and carved out kingdoms and fiefdoms in England and the Mediterranean where they battled both Muslim armies and the Byzantine Empire. It was the dream of Guiscard that he would conquer the Eastern Roman Empire and that one day Bohemond would sit on the imperial throne in Constantinople. Initially successful in their forays into the territories of the Byzantines, the Norman forces were eventually driven out of the Balkans.

When his father died in 1085, Bohemond fought his half-brother Roger and his fierce step-mother Sichelgaita for succession to Guiscard’s duchy. He was forced to settle for a portion in southern Italy, causing him to look for more territory to conquer. When the First Crusade was preached in 1095 by Pope Urban, who urged the kings of western Europe to recapture the Holy Land, Bohemond saw his opportunity. He raised an army and led it across the Balkans to Constantinople and a rendezvous with the other crusading western nobles and their forces.

The Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus was dismayed by the presence of a massive western force outside the walls. When he appealed to the pope for help against Seljuk Turks he was hoping for bands of mercenary cavalry, not the presence of warriors led by his very recent enemy Bohemond. Alexius met the crusaders and agreed to help and supply them in the journey across Asia Minor as long as they agreed to return imperial lands now under Muslim control to him. The emperor’s daughter Anna Comnena wrote a biography of her father in which she drew a very vivid portrait of Bohemond, whom she had met and of whom she said, he

was such as, to put it briefly, had never before been seen in the land of the Romans, be he either of the barbarians or of the Greeks (for he was a marvel for the eyes to behold, and his reputation was terrifying). Let me describe the barbarian’s appearance more particularly — he was so tall in stature that he overtopped the tallest by nearly one cubit, narrow in the waist and loins, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and powerful arms. And in the whole build of the body he was neither too slender nor overweighted with flesh, but perfectly proportioned … His skin all over his body was very white, and in his face the white was tempered with red. His hair was yellowish, but did not hang down to his waist like that of the other barbarians; for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair, but had it cut short to the ears. Whether his beard was reddish, or any other colour I cannot say, for the razor had passed over it very closely and left a surface smoother than chalk… His blue eyes indicated both a high spirit and dignity; and his nose and nostrils breathed in the air freely; his chest corresponded to his nostrils and by his nostrils…the breadth of his chest. For by his nostrils nature had given free passage for the high spirit which bubbled up from his heart. A certain charm hung about this man but was partly marred by a general air of the horrible… He was so made in mind and body that both courage and passion reared their crests within him and both inclined to war.

The First Crusade fought its way across Asia Minor, defeating all the Turkish armies it met, but relations with the Byzantines were not easy. The crusaders accused the Byzantines of keeping them under-supplied, and of treacherous dealings with Muslim forces. (The Byzantines were at peace with a number of Islamic emirates whereas the westerners were less able to make such a fine distinction.) Finally, after a bloody siege at Antioch which fell in 1098, Bohemond decided to keep the city and remain there despite the emperor’s claims and the desire of other crusaders to continue on to Jerusalem. He named a Catholic clergyman as patriarch of Antioch and expelled the Orthodox incumbent. Hoping to enlarge his new principality Bohemond embarked on a daring expedition in 1100 but was captured and held for ransom until 1103.

Whatever crusading idealism that might have existed in Bohemond’s soul was not evident after this point, as for the rest of his life he battled Byzantines, Seljuk Turks and those crusading lords who supported the emperor’s claims. He returned to Europe to raise men and more money but instead of returning to the Holy Land he again invaded Byzantine Europe where he was defeated and forced to a humiliating peace, accepting Alexius’s sovereignty over Antioch. He died in Italy in 1111.

1993

The siege of the Branch Davidian compound begins

Vernon Wayne Howell (1959-93), was a charismatic ne’er-do-well who, in the late 1980s, engineered a takeover of the Branch Davidian sect, a breakaway splinter of the Shepherd’s Rod, which was itself the product of a schism in the Seventh Day Adventist movement. The sect’s previous leader had killed a man with an axe for asserting that Howell was the Messiah and this enabled Howell to achieve leadership of the group and control of its compound near Waco, Texas which they had dubbed the Mount Carmel Centre.

In 1990 Howell had his name legally changed to David Koresh — David to signify his claim to the lineage of the Old Testament King and Koresh as a nod to the Persian emperor Cyrus who had liberated the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity and was hailed as a Messiah. His Biblical interpretation foresaw an imminent martyrdom and an apocalyptic end times in which his children by multiple wives would rule the world after the return of Christ. Rumours of polygamy and under-age sex, as well as the illegal stockpiling of weapons, prompted an ill-advised raid on the compound on this day in 1993 in which four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians were killed. This marked the beginning of a 51-day siege in which controversial government tactics and the increasing madness of Koresh coincided in a bloody and fiery climax which took 76 lives, including 17 children.

Two years later the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City Bombing which killed 168 people cited the Waco siege as a reason for their anti-government terrorism.

Commemoration of George Herbert

On this day the Anglican Church honours George Herbert (1593-1633), politician, orator, priest and poet. Herbert was born in Wales but sent to be educated in England. At Cambridge he was so learned in Latin that he was named the University Orator with the task of delivering speeches of note in that language, such as welcoming King James I who, for a time, became his patron. He sat in Parliament as an M.P. twice but the accession of Charles I seems to have blunted his worldly ambitions. Herbert married Jane Danvers who is said to have fallen in love with him without having met, so esteemed was he by her relatives. Izaak Walton, his biographer, notes that the couple met each other only three days before the wedding “at which time a mutual affection entered into both their hearts, as a Conqueror enters into a surprized City, and made there such Laws and Resolutions, as neither party was able to resist.” He became a priest and spent the last few years of his life as rector of the small parish of Fuggleston St. Peter in Wiltshire where he made a reputation as a faithful servant of his flock.

Today he is revered as one of the greatest of the “metaphysical poets”, a group of 17th century English writers which includes John Donne, Henry Vaughan and Andrew Marvell. Here is one of his most famous works:

Prayer (I)

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,

         God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

         The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,

         Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

         The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

         Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

         Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

         Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

1229

The Sixth Crusade regains Jerusalem

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) was one of the most remarkable men of the Middle Ages, known in his own time as “Stupor Mundi”, the “Wonder of the World”. His attempts to dominate both Germany and Italy attracted the hostility of the papacy, an antipathy which would lead in the long run to the gutting of the Empire. He was excommunicated four times, called the “Antichrist” by a pope and showed suspicious favour to Muslims, but went on Crusade and regained Jerusalem for Christendom.

The spirit of crusading was still alive in Europe despite the disgraceful Fourth Crusade which never reached the Holy Land and ended up sacking Christian Constantinople instead. Frederick in 1220 promised to go on the Fifth Crusade launched at the Muslim stronghold in Egypt but he never appeared. The failure of that expedition was therefore laid at his feet. He promised the pope that he would lead another crusade by 1227 but when that seemed as if it would not materialize, he was excommunicated by Gregory IX.

Finally in 1229 Frederick arrived on the strip of the eastern Mediterranean coast still held by Christian forces. He discovered that he need not fight for Jerusalem and that the local Muslim leader, preoccupied by other wars, was wiling to offer Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a 10 year truce. Unfortunately the Church was not impressed by this action which had been carried out without its approval and Frederick quarrelled with local crusader barons. He left the Holy Land holding a disputed claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem and still excommunicated. Jerusalem soon fell back into Muslim hands.

St Agatha’s Day

There are thousands of saints who have been venerated by Christians  over the century and depicted in art. Since most of their real features are unknown to us, how do artists portray them and how can viewers distinguish one pictured saint from another? The trick is to look for visual clues. A saint, for example, carrying a palm branch may be reliably counted on to be a martyr. Or a saint can be determined by the presence of the weapon that killed him — St Paul by a sword, St Lawrence by a griddle or St Sebastian by an arrow. Then again, since saints can be prayed to for particular ailments, they are often shown with that particular part of the body emphasized. Those suffering from skin diseases will want to turn to St Job who sat on a dunghill scratching his afflicted flesh. And so it is with St Agatha, the saint who is memorialized with images of a breast.

Agatha was a Christian virgin who was caught up in the Decian persecution of 250. She refused to renounce her religion and so was sentenced to a brothel but refused to participate and remained a virgin. Her breasts were ripped off with pincers (though the painting above shows her wounds being healed by St Peter in their prison) and she was burnt to  death on hot coals. To this day, sufferers of sore breasts ask St Agatha to help them. In Catania where she originated, they celebrate her feast day with great spectacle. One visitor has described it thus:

The nearly manic celebration begins at dawn on February 4 when Agatha’s life-sized effigy, dripping in jewels collected since the 12th century, is pulled through the streets on a 40,000-pound silver carriage by a cast of 5,000 men. The soundtrack of the procession is grunting, crying, and the grinding wheels of the carriage or fercolo pushing through molten candle wax. All the while thousands scream, “Viva Sant’ Agata.”

St Theophilus the Penitent Day

Theophilus of Adana (d. 538) was a priest of Asia Minor in the Byzantine empire. He declined a bishopric because he thought himself unworthy of the position. Enemies slandered him to the new bishop with accusations of theft and he was removed from his position of archdeacon. Outraged by the injustice he signed a pact with the Devil. In return for vengeance, wealth and the bishopric, he was to deny Christ and the Virgin Mary in a pact written in his own blood. Repenting of his rashness later, he appealed to the Virgin and undertook a penitential fast of forty days. The Virgin rescued him by fetching back the contract he had signed with the Infernal Powers. The pact was burnt in the town square and Theophilus entered into legend with the story told many times in the Middle Ages. It was an influential story – perhaps the earliest tale of a deal with the devil – and it emphasised to the medieval mind the reality of Satan and the power of the Virgin Mary