August 7

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John Mason Neale

Lovers of traditional Christmas carols, ecumenicism and church history are much in debt to this Anglican clergyman.

Neale was born in 1818 to a clerical family and was educated at Cambridge. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England but his career suffered because of  his high church sympathies at a time when the Oxford Movement and the defection of prominent clerics to Roman Catholicism were causing turmoil in Anglicanism. He was removed from his parish by his bishop and became warden of an almshouse. Neale founded a religious nursing order for Anglican women, the Society of St Margaret, which provoked yet more controversy, and fostered connections between the Church of England and Eastern Orthodoxy. He was also an ecclesiastical historian of some note, producing a number of volumes on liturgy, the medieval church and Orthodoxy. However, it is as a hymn writer, collector and translator that he is best known.

In the early 19th century the singing of Christmas carols was dying and many of the old songs were long forgotten or sung only in remote parishes. Neale and a small group of musicologists helped to rescue many classics from oblivion. To him we owe translations of “Good Christian Men Rejoice”, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and (though not to everyone’s taste) “Good King Wenceslas”. The latter song has irritated music critics for over a century with its awkward combination of words and music, but this St Stephen’s Day song has proven to be an enduring favourite. Neale’s words, written in 1853, about the tenth-century Bohemian Duke Wenceslas 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.

Neale died on August 6, 1868 but is honoured by Anglicans on August 7 because of the observance of the Transfiguration the day before.

August 6

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Feast of the Transfiguration

And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. And, behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias: Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that stood with him. And it came to pass, as they departed from him, Peter said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not knowing what he said. While he thus spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them: and they feared as they entered into the cloud. And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him. And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone. And they kept it close, and told no man in those days any of those things which they had seen. (Luke 28-36)

The Feast seems to have originated in the churches of the East with the Latin Church being slow to adopt it. It is not mentioned before 850 and was not mandated for the whole Catholic Church until 1456 when Pope  Callixtus III used it to mark the victory gained by John Hunyady at Belgrade over the Turks. On this day the pope at Mass uses new wine or presses a bunch of ripe grapes into the chalice; raisins are also blessed at Rome. The Greeks and Russians bless grapes and other fruit.

Though the name of the mountain is not given in the Gospels, the Transfiguration has become associated with Mount Tabor.

August 5

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1944

The Night of 100 Suicides

Japanese prisoners of war were, relatively speaking, a rare phenomenon in World War II. Schooled in the ethos of the bushido warrior code, Japanese soldiers much preferred death to dishonour and would almost always fight to the last man or commit suicide rather than surrender.

In Cowra POW Camp in New South Wales, Australia, 4,000 enemy soldiers and interned civilians were held: Japanese, principally from captured merchant ships, Koreans, political prisoners from the Dutch East Indies, and Italians, captured in the North African campaign. The latter were the happiest of the captives, often allowed out into the community on their own or in work details, many of them making friends (and lovers) among the local population. The Japanese, however, were troublesome and resentful. Unlike the Italians, they were not trusted outside the camp, but otherwise were well treated according to Geneva Convention rules, quite unlike the barbarous conditions faced by Australians captured by the Japanese.

About 2 in the morning of 5 August 1944, a bugle sounded, and over a thousand Japanese erupted from their barracks, armed with makeshift weapons, and attempted a mass escape, the largest ever tried during the war.  Shouting “Banzai” they threw themselves at the barbed wire fences. With blankets, baseball gloves and bare bodies, they neutralized the wire and assaulted the few guards in human wave attacks. Inside the barracks, a dozen prisoners had hanged themselves while others set fire to the compound. At the cost of hundreds of lives they overwhelmed their captors and escaped into the night. They scrupulously observed their commanders’ instructions to harm no civilians but they resisted any attempt at recapture. It took four days to round up the escapees, though more were killed in the process and more committed suicide. In the end, the casualty list read four Australian dead, 231 Japanese killed, and 108 wounded.

A military court of inquiry determined

  • that conditions at the camp were fully in accordance with the International Convention;
  • that no complaints regarding treatment had been made by or on behalf of the Japanese prior to the incident, which appeared to have been a premeditated and concerted plan of the prisoners;
  • that the actions of the Australian garrison in resisting the attack averted greater loss of life, and that firing ceased as soon as control was assured; and
  • that many of the dead had died by suicide or by the hand of other prisoners, and that many of the wounded had suffered self-inflicted wounds.

A survivor explained the motivation for the events: “the soldiers has been brainwashed to believe that only a shameful coward with no right to exist would ever surrender in wartime. Even their families often couldn’t accept defeated troops returning home, and they were often treated like fearful ghosts and driven away.” Today Cowra has become a place of pilgrimage and friendship for the Japanese people, and is the location of the only Japanese War Cemetery in Australia, containing the graves of those Japanese killed in the breakout.

August 4

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1578

Alcazar, the Battle of Three Kings

Christian crusades against Islamic powers were not confined to the Holy Land. An example of this is the expedition launched by the doomed Portuguese king Sebastian against the sultanate of Morocco, a sortie that had profound repercussions in a number of countries.

Sebastian I (1554-78) acceded to the throne of Portugal at the age of three. This was a time of great national prosperity brought by the wealth of Asian, African and Brazilian trade outposts; the Portuguese had developed a commercial empire that stretched around the world. Sebastian, despite his youth, proved to be a competent and charitable king, reforming laws, establishing hospitals and shelters and encouraging the fair treatment of colonial natives. He was also a very pious Christian, the product of a Jesuit education; he is said to have carried a copy of the writings of Thomas Aquinas with him at all times.

Was it this piety that led him to fear contact with women? Was it the fact that his mother abandoned him shortly after his birth to return to Spain to become Regent, never to see him again? Or was it the result of sexual abuse at the hands of a paedophile as a recent history of the king has suggested?* Whatever the cause, Sebastian assiduously avoided his royal duty to marry and continue his dynastic line. He channeled his energy into dreams of martial success and when presented with a chance to invade the land of Islam and battle the enemies of Christendom he seized the chance.

It was in the national interests of Portugal that the sultanate of Morocco not be too powerful or fall under the control of the Turkish empire which was expanding its influence along the coast of North Africa. In 1576 the sultan Abdallah Mohammed II was deposed in a palace coup. He fled to the Iberian peninsula where he sought the aid of the kings of Spain and Portugal to regain his throne in return for promises of good relations. Spain sent only a battalion of volunteers but Sebastian mounted an expensive expedition containing the cream of Portuguese nobility, mercenaries, and a curious group of English Catholics who had intended to invade Ireland at the behest of the pope.

Sebastian’s force landed in Morocco where he was joined by the troops of Abdallah and together they marched inland. At Alcazar (aka Alcacer Quibir, aka Alcazarquivir) these forces met the much larger army of Abd al-Malik I who had summoned a jihad to confront the invader. Outnumbered by 3 to 1, Sebastian’s forces were overwhelmed. He was killed as were Abdallah and Abd al-Malik. Thousands of Portuguese were taken prisoner and were either enslaved (if poor) or were subject to costly ransom. Sebastian’s body (or what was purported to be his corpse) was also ransomed but there were many doubts expressed as to whether it really was the king.

Before the expedition, Philip of Spain remarked, “if he succeeds, we shall have a fine nephew, if he fails, a fine kingdom.” The throne of Portugal passed from the childless Sebastian to an aged uncle who was a Catholic cardinal, resulting in a succession crisis that saw Philip within a few years seizing the country and its empire. Portugal was devastated financially by the cost of the ransoms as well as the Spanish takeover. Moreover, imposter after imposter appeared, each claiming to be the young king and setting off more political turmoil.

* Harold B. Johnson in “A Pedophile in the Palace: or The Sexual Abuse of King Sebastian of Portugal (1554-1578) and its Consequences” says that the king’s Jesuit confessor, Padre Luis Gonçalves da Câmara, was most probably the child molester who infected the boy with gonorrhea.

August 3

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1914

Germany invades France

After a month of posturing and threats following the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, the powers of Europe finally take up arms; with the German invasion of France the Great War, the First World War begins.

The German General Staff had long planned their strategy for the conquest of France. Knowing that they faced enemies on two fronts — the French Republic to the west, the Russian Empire to the east — they counted on a quick strike to knock one of their enemies out of the war before turning to confront the other. Since France was more highly industrialized and mechanized, they could mobilize their armies more quickly than the Russians, so the Germans made the French their first target. According to the Schlieffen Plan, proposed in 1905 by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the Chief of the Imperial Army German General Staff, the German army would concentrate its forces on the Western Front and avoid French fortifications by invading through neutral Belgium and Luxembourg, a gross violation of international law and a treaty to which Germany was a signatory.

On August 3, seven German field armies, comprising 80% of the empire’s armed forces, began to move, sweeping through Belgium and Luxembourg, hoping to smash the French armies on the border and encircle Paris. At first they were successful, taking the great fortress of Liege and capturing Brussels. The French, meanwhile, were concentrating on a thrust east into Alsace, held by the Germans since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 but considered by the French to be theirs. By late August German forces had entered France, coming to within 43 miles of Paris, where they were stalled by stiffening French resistance and the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force. The Schlieffen Plan had failed; the result was a stalemate and four years of hideous, near-static trench warfare.

August 2

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“We have rounded up all the priests and parasites… we have lit our torches and applied the purifying fire to all the churches… and we have covered the countryside and purified it of the plague of religion.”  – Solidaridad Obrera (anarchist newspaper), August 20, 1936

On this day the Catholic Church honours a number of men and women martyred during the Spanish Civil War. One of the issues that divided the Loyalist or Republican side from the Nationalist rebels was their attitude toward the Catholic Church. The Nationalists were pro-Catholic while the Republic was supported by many fierce anticlericals and atheists who were happy to murder priests, disinter dead nuns and use the corpses for shooting practice, and desecrate churches.

Ceferino Jimenez-Malla, an 85-year-old gypsy, was shot in 1936 for hiding priests; he was the first Roma to be beatified. Sister Gabriela of Saint John of the Cross, Teresa Subira Sanjaume, Maria Roqueta Serra, and Vicenta Achurra Gogenola were all Carmelite nuns denounced to the left-wing junta of Barcelona in 1936. They were taken away in a van and shot beside the highway.

 

August 1

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1944

The Warsaw Uprising Begins

When Nazi armies collaborated with the Soviet Red Army in overrunning Poland in the autumn of 1939, the occupying forces set out to eradicate Polish identity. Both the Germans and Russians took special care to imprison and murder the country’s intellectual, artistic, political and military leaders. The Nazis aimed to rid the country of its Slavic population and replace it with German colonists; the USSR aimed to Sovietize the Poles; both wished to erase Poland from the map.

Patriotic Poles, however, continued to resist; some inside the country in partisan units devoted to sabotage; some outside the country in the armies of the Allies. Polish fliers participated in the Battle of Britain; Polish soldiers battled the Germans in Italy and on D-Day in France. Unfortunately there was no political union, no single government-in-exile that could speak for Poland — a pro-western group was based in London and a pro-Soviet group operated from Moscow. When Poles exposed the Soviet perpetrators of the 1940 Katyn massacre of Polish officers, the USSR curtailed cooperation with the western group. This was to prove fatal in 1944.

For years the Polish Home Army and other partisan groups had been harassing German forces and arming for a general uprising. Some of these units had assisted Polish Jews in their doomed battle for the Warsaw Ghetto and all looked forward to the advance of Allied armies. By the summer of 1944 it was apparent that the Red Army would be the first to liberate Poland and it was decided that a mass rebellion would begin on August 1. The plan was to take control of Warsaw and then link up with advancing Russian forces to drive the Germans out of the rest of the country.

On August 1 tens of thousands of Poles attacked German bunkers and fortifications in Warsaw. For four days they scored successes, occupying much of the centre of the capital, liberating a concentration camp and causing Germans to withdraw. However, the Red Army halted its advance and refused to come to the aid of the Poles; Stalin refused British and American airforces permission to drop supplies. When the western Allies flew over Poland anyway, Stalin refused permission for them to land in territory under Red control, thus limiting the capacity and effectiveness of the airdrops. The Germans, on the other hand, were able to rush reinforcements into the city. After a while stalemate, turned to siege, civilians and partisans began to starve and German troops carried out massacres of inhabitants in order to break the will of the resistance. Fighting continued until early October by which time much of the city was in flames, Home Army troops had surrendered and the civilians were forced out of Warsaw, 85% of which had been destroyed in the fighting or in the aftermath by vengeful German troops.

July 31

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1556

Death of St Ignatius of Loyola

Ignatius Loyola, ‘a Spanish soldier and hidalgo with hot Biscayan blood,’ was, in 1521, assisting in the defence of Pampeluna against the French, when a cannon-ball fractured his right leg and a splinter injured his left. He was carried to the neighbouring castle of Loyola, and in the weary months during which he lay stretched upon his couch, he tried to while away the time in reading the Lives of the Saints. He was only thirty; he had a strong and vehement will; he had led a wild and vicious life; and had burned for military glory. As it was evident that for him henceforward the part of the soldier was barred, the question arose, Why might he not be a saint, and rival St. Francis and St. Dominic?

He decided to try. He tore himself from his kindred and friends, and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In the church of the Virgin at Mount Serrat, he hung up his arms, and vowed constant obedience to God and the church. Dressed as a beggar, and in the practice of the severest austerities, he reached Jerusalem on the 4th of September 1523. On his return to Spain, at the age of thirty-three, he resumed his education, which had been neglected from childhood, and laboriously from the rudiments of grammar worked his way through a full university course, making no secret of his ignorance. The rigour of his life, and the rebukes he administered to lax ecclesiastics, not unfrequently brought him into trouble as a Pharisaic meddler.

He went to Paris in 1528, and at the university he made the acquaintance of Xavier, Faber, Lainez, Bobadilla, and Rodriguez, five students whom he inspired with his own devout fervour. In an underground chapel of the church of Montmartre, on the 15th of August 1534, the six enthusiasts took the solemn vows of celibacy, poverty, and the devotion of their lives to the care of Christians, and the conversion of infidels. Such was the beginning of the famous Society of Jesus.

The plan of the new order was laid before Pope Paul III, who raised several objections to it; but, on the engagement that Jesuits should in all matters yield implicit obedience to the holy see, he granted them a constitution in a bull, dated the 27th of September 1540. Loyola was elected president, and was established at Rome as director of the movements of the society. Very opportunely did the Jesuits come to the service of the popedom. Unhampered by the routine of other ecclesiastical orders, they undertook services for which they alone were fit; and, as sharp-shooters and skirmishers, became the most annoying and dangerous antagonists of Protestantism. To a certain freedom of action the Jesuit united the advantages of perfect discipline; obedience was his primary duty. He used his faculties, but their action was controlled by a central authority; every command had to be wrought out with all his skill and energy, without questioning, and at all hazards. It was the aim of the society to discover and develop the peculiar genius of all its members, and then to apply them to the aggrandizement of the church. Soon the presence of the new order, and the fame of its missionaries, spread throughout the world, and successive popes gladly increased the numbers and enlarged the privileges of the society. Loyola brought more ardour than intellect to the institution of Jesuitism. The perfection of its mechanism, which Cardinal Richelieu pronounced a master-piece of policy, was due to James Lainez, who succeeded Loyola as president.

Worn out with labours and privations, Loyola died on the 31st of July 1556, aged sixty-five. He was canonised as a saint in 1622, and his festival is celebrated on the 31st of July. He is a patron saint of soldiers.

July 30

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1975

The Disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa

James Riddle Hoffa (1913-75) was a working-class kid who got into the union-organizing business while working in a grocery store. By the time he was in his 20s he was working for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union of truckers and warehouse workers. As Hoffa rose through its ranks, he helped the Teamsters organize on a national basis and become one of the most powerful unions in America, able to disrupt the country’s transport of goods with strikes and boycotts. In order to do so, Hoffa and the Teamsters developed links with organized crime, which wanted to get its hands  on the pension fund. He became union vice-president in 1952 and president in 1958, a position he held until 1971.

The corruption of the Teamsters was well-known to authorities in the government and labour circles. The union was expelled from the AFL-CIO, the umbrella organization for organized labour, and Attorney-General Robert Kennedy went after Hoffa and the Teamsters with a vengeance. He was convicted in 1964 of jury-tampering and fraud and served time in prison from 1967-71, though it was widely-believed he continued to control the union through stooges. He was released by President Nixon (some say in return for an exchange of money and guarantee of union support) but only on the condition that he refrain from Teamster activity until 1980.

Hoffa’s attempts to regain control of the Teamsters was resisted from many inside the union and may have disrupted plans by organized crime to work closely with those now in charge of the union. On the afternoon of July 30, 1975 he was scheduled to meet  Anthony Giacalone and Anthony Provenzano, two Mafia bosses, at a restaurant in Detroit but he was never seen again. Though his body has never been recovered (its position was said to be under various highways, in various fields or beneath Giants Stadium in New Jersey) the consensus is that he was murdered very soon after his disappearance. Hoffa’s son James has been president of the Teamsters since 1999.

July 29

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1981

Charles and Diana wed

A great wedding and a terrible marriage. On this day in 1981, Lady Diana Spencer and His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, KG, KT, GCB, OM, AK, CC, QSO, PC, ADC, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, Field Marshal, Admiral of the Fleet in the Royal Navy, Marshal of the Royal Air Force and Colonel in the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, (MA Cantab), were wed at St Paul’s Cathedral in London in a ceremony watched by 3,000 in the church, 750,000,000 on television around the world. Among the guests were most of the crowned heads of the planet, including the dispossessed claimants to monarchies that had ceased to exist, such as Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

As heir to the throne it was essential that Charles should wed. Though he had had numerous girl friends and mistresses before his proposal to Lady Diana, none of these women were considered suitable marriage partners or a future Queen — soft porn actresses, wives of his friends, and Catholic princesses all fell short of the required standard. It does not appear that he was much in love with his intended spouse but she was young, beautiful, of noble birth, and a virgin: four qualities rarely found in the same woman in England at the time. They became engaged in February 1981 and plans for a sumptuous ceremony were set in motion immediately.

The bride wore a gown of ivory silk taffeta, decorated with lace, hand embroidery, sequins, and 10,000 pearls with a 25-foot train of ivory taffeta and antique lace. The dress had to be altered considerably as Diana had suffered a weight loss due to bulimia. (One critic called the outfit “too much dress, too little princess.”) Charles wore the uniform of a naval commander, festooned with the decorations of the Orders of the Garter, Thistle, and the Bath. Three choirs, three orchestras and a brass ensemble provided the music; the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of St Paul’s, a Catholic cardinal and sundry Protestant clerics conducted the service.

The marriage soon fell apart. Charles insisted on the royal prerogative of keeping a mistress and Diana took to preying on other women’s husbands.