Christmas Every Day

1965

Roger Allen Laporte, a 22-year-old former seminarian, protesting against American participation in the war in Vietnam, sets himself on fire in front of the United Nations building in New York.  Inspired by the examples of Vietnamese Buddhist monks, American pacifist Alice Herz, and the Quaker Norman Morrison who had committed self-immolation earlier, LaPorte drenched himself with gasoline, and set himself alight, dying the next day from his burns. When asked why he had done this, La Porte replied, “I’m a Catholic Worker. I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.” The Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the 1930s, stresses charity, non-violence and a counter-cultural Christianity.

Laporte’s suicide by fire would not be last such death in protest against American participation in the Vietnamese war. Two others would follow by 1970.

1342

Julian of Norwich, English mystic is born. The author of Revelations of Divine Love, the first published book in English written by a woman, was a religious recluse whose true name is still unknown. In the 1370s she began to experience visions whose meanings she explored in a series of books. Her view of God focused primarily on His loving nature: “God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.” Recent scholarship (Denys Turner’s Julian of Norwich, Theologian) takes her seriously as a thinker.

1431

The birth of Vlad III, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad Drakul, aka Dracula, prince of Wallachia. Though known in folklore for his extreme cruelty and for his inspiration for Bram Stoker’s literary villain, Vlad is renowned in the Balkans for his defence of Christian lands against Turkish Islamic expansion. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman emperor Mehmet the Conqueror attempted to complete the Muslim conquest of southeastern Europe. Vlad refused to acknowledge Turkish overlordship or pay the jizya tax imposed on Christian subjects. His armies inflicted a number of defeats on the Turks before he died in battle in 1476.

1674

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast/ Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,/With loss of Eden, till one greater Man/Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse . . .

John Milton, English writer, dies. Though his reputation as a poet had been in the making before the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, his work during the Puritan Commonwealth was of a polemical nature. He argued for the legitimacy of Christian divorce, for free speech (Areopagitica) and for the right of a people to overthrow a tyrannical ruler (On the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates). His blindness, which became total in 1654 did not prevent him from continuing his political writings or his poetry (see his sonnet “On My Blindness”). The restoration of the monarchy forced him into hiding for a time but he managed to live peacefully until his death. In 1667 he published Paradise Lost, the epic poem on the Fall of mankind. Milton’s standing as a literary figure has always been controversial. C.S. Lewis was a fan; T.S. Eliot was not. Curious readers unwilling to attempt an ascent on the summit of Paradise Lost might try his Christmas poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”: “See how from far upon the Eastern road/ The Star-led Wizards haste with odours sweet”.

1605 The Gunpowder Plot exposed.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November:
Gunpowder, treason and plot!
I can think of no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

The open practice of Roman Catholicism had been banned since 1559 but many English families remained loyal to the Catholic church. They had hoped that the accession of King James to the throne in 1603 would lead to religious toleration. James was, after all, the son of Mary Queen of Scots the Catholic martyr, and a man known to be in favour of peace. But both extreme Protestants, the Puritans, and Catholics were to be disappointed by the king’s religious policies. It was the opinion of William Cecil, the advisor to James, that “the state would never be in safety, where there was toleration of two religions. For there is no enmity so great as that of religion, and they that differ in the service of God can never agree in service of their country”.

A group of disappointed Catholics decided that violence was the answer. They planned to blow up the opening of the 1605 Parliament and, at a stroke, wipe out the leadership of Protestant England. The king, his sons, the English aristocracy, and all of the bishops of the Anglican Church were expected to die in the explosion. Princess Elizabeth (age 9) would be abducted and made a figure-head queen while a general uprising of Catholics would seize the nation’s strong points. Barrels of gunpowder had been placed under the Houses of Parliament but one of the conspirators foolishly warned a Catholic nobleman to stay away from the opening and he alerted the authorities. Explosives expect Guy Fawkes was arrested at the site and his fellow conspirators were rounded up; they were all tried and gruesomely executed.

November 5 became known as Guy Fawkes Day and the date became a national, patriotic, anti-Catholic holiday for centuries.

361 The Christian emperor Constantius II dies, leaving the throne of the Roman Empire to his cousin Julian, a born-again pagan. Julian, known to history as the Apostate, will die in battle less than two years later, the last ruler of the Constantinian dynasty. The Roman empire will thereafter always be ruled by a Christian.

1534 Henry VIII establishes the Church of England. Needing to abandon the jurisdiction of the pope to gain legitimacy for his divorce to Katherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, Henry has his Parliament pass the Act of Supremacy, naming the king “the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England”.

1793 The execution of Olympe de Gouges. Born Marie Gouze in 1748 Olympe lived a life of scandal and radicalism. She advocated sexual freedom, easy divorce, an end to slavery, and political rights for women. An early supporter of the French Revolution, she was arrested by the Jacobin faction who were beginning their Reign of Terror. On this date she was executed by the Paris guillotine.

1917 The Balfour Declaration. A letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter Rothschild and the Zionist Federation declares British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people” providing “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities”.

1917 The Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (under control of V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks) meets to lay the groundwork for a rebellion against the democratic government of Russia.

1947 The Flight of the Spruce Goose. The largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built takes its first, and only, flight with designer Howard Hughes at the controls. Despite the nickname the H-4 seaplane was built from fir.

1963 The assassination of the Diem brothers. An American-backed coup by elements of the South Vietnamese Army deposes President Ngo Dinh Diem, murdering him and his brother Ngo Dihn Nhu.

1755 The Lisbon Earthquake

On the morning of November 1, All Saint’s Day, at 9:40, a massive earthquake, followed a tsunami, and a series of devastating fires destroyed the city of Lisbon and wrought havoc on much of the Portuguese coastal area. The quake’s effects were felt as far away as Brazil and Greenland. It is estimated that 40,000-50,000 people may have died with many more injured or homeless.

About 85% of the city was destroyed. Palaces, hospitals, churches, homes and government buildings were obliterated. Precious libraries and art work were lost forever as well as much of the architecture of earlier ages. (Those who find the distinctive Portuguese late Gothic style known as Manueline to be too ugly for words will not rue the destruction of the Ribeira Palace.)

The saviour of Lisbon was the Prime Minister Sebastião de Melo, later ennobled as the Marquis of Pombal. His immediate task was to “bury the dead and heal the living” but important decisions were to be made about the future of the city. Should it be abandoned, rebuilt with scavenged material, or levelled and rebuilt from scratch? It was the latter course that was adopted. The dark, narrow and winding streets of medieval Lisbon were gone, and a beautiful new central Lisbon emerged with wide streets laid out in a grid, spacious squares and a handsome neoclassical architecture that came to be known as Pombaline. These new buildings were designed to be earthquake-proof, one of the earliest attempts at anti-seismic building; many of them were pre-fabricated outside the city and moved quickly into place.

Though Lisbon was confidently rebuilt, the disaster seems to have shaken European philosophy as well. Voltaire used the catastrophe to mock the optimism of Leibniz and Pope, asking “And can you then impute a sinful deed/ To babes who on their mothers’ bosoms bleed?/ Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found,/ Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?/Was less debauchery to London known,/ Where opulence luxurious holds the throne?” Kant and Rousseau also weighed in on the subject.

1940 End of the Battle of Britain

In June of 1940 as the armies of Nazi Germany sprawled triumphantly across western Europe, Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke to the House of Commons:

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

The Battle of Britain, which was to prepare for a sea-borne invasion of England, was entrusted by Adolf Hitler to the Luftwaffe, his airforce. The plan was to secure a safe crossing of the Channel by wiping out the possibility of resistance by the Royal Air Force. RAF squadrons were to be lured to the sky or destroyed on the ground by the veteran pilots of the Luftwaffe who had successfully destroyed the airforces of Poland, France, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands. Once the RAF was out of the way, bombing of cities would destroy the British economy and morale and pave the way for an easy invasion. The ineffective performance of the RAF in the skies over France gave Field Marshal Hermann Goering much optimism.

For months in the summer and autumn of 1940 thousands of missions were flown against Britain. Though the RAF was outnumbered, it possessed two excellent fighter craft, the Hurricane and the Spitfire, manned not only by British crews but exiles from Nazi Europe and volunteers from the Commonwealth. Radar intelligence gave the defenders a look at their attackers as they formed up and advanced. It was a close run thing. On October 31, the Luftwaffe abandoned the attempt to destroy the RAF and abandoned plans for an invasion. The Battle of Britain had ended and the Blitz — the attack on British cities — would begin.