August 14

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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.

August 9

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1974

Richard Nixon resigns

It’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up. That’s the lesson imparted by the saga of Richard Nixon and the Watergate Hotel break-in, a tangled tale that led to the only resignation of an American President.

Nixon had a long career of public service. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he was elected as a congressman from California in 1946 and gained a reputation as a fervent anti-Communist. His part in the unmasking of former State department advisor Alger Hiss as a Communist agent won him national fame, vaulting him to a Senate victory, and then prompting Dwight Eisenhower to chose him as his vice-presidential running mate in the 1952 election. In 1960 he failed to beat John Kennedy in the presidential election and failed as well in 1962 an attempt to be California governor, afterwards telling reporters they wouldn’t have “Nixon to kick around anymore”. Nixon was able to take advantage of the disenchantment of voters with the Vietnam war and the Democrats, beating Hubert Humphrey in a 1968 presidential campaign. He was re-elected in 1972 but that’s when the wheels began to fall off the wagon.

The 1972 election was marked by a number of disgraceful political tricks and malpractice. Among these was an attempted break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington’s Watergate Hotel. The perpetrators were easily detected and reporters were able to link them to certain figures in the White House and Nixon’s re-election campaign. The question then was: did the President know about this shabby scheme? Nixon denied it, but to everyone’s astonishment it was revealed that conversations in the presidential mansion were routinely tape-recorded. As the nation watched, Nixon’s legal team fought against disclosing the tapes; Nixon sacked the Watergate Special Counsel. At last the Supreme Court ruled that the tapes had to be disclosed and a smoking gun was revealed — Nixon had known about the cover-up and deceived the nation. Rather than face impeachment, he resigned and returned to private life.

Historians are still uncertain about how to weigh Nixon’s legacy. He was certainly a productive president: he brought forth environmental protections, opened up to Red China, negotiated missile reduction with the USSR, pulled troops out of Vietnam and ended military conscription, but his secretive, driven personality and his perceived deviousness won him no friends.

August 7

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by gerryadmin

1560

Birth of the Blood Countess

Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (1560-1614) has the infamous reputation of being the world’s most prolific female serial killer. Legend has placed the number of her victims in the hundreds.

Elizabeth was a noblewoman of the Holy Roman Empire, owning lands in what is now Hungary and Romania, dangerous border territory at a time when the Empire was at war with the Ottoman Turks. It was said that while in her early teens she took a low-class lover and had a child by him; the poor fellow was castrated and fed to the dogs. She married another aristocrat a few years later and produced four children. She was known to be well-educated, beautiful, multilingual and a competent administrator of estates while her husband was absent in the wars; she was also known to have been less than scrupulous as a monogamist and entertained lovers while her husband was away.

Around the year 1600 rumours began to spread about the horrible fate of young girls who had been lured to her castle on the pretext of employment and who were never seen alive again. She was denounced by a Lutheran minister and the imperial government reluctantly agreed in 1610 to investigate the scandal. At her trial, 300 witnesses were heard; they accused her and her servant accomplices of torture, murder, and drinking the blood of virgins. The servants were executed and the countess was locked in a windowless room until her death.

Modern pop culture has made much of her. Her castle is a tourist attraction; locals make wine with her picture on the label; movies and books have played up the lurid sado-sexual aspects of her life (see below). Some historians believe she was the victim of a conspiracy and doubt her guilt. Where’s the fun in that?

August 4

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1892

The Borden Murders

“Lizzie Borden took an axe/ And gave her mother 40 whacks./ When she saw what she had done,/ She gave her father forty-one.” On the morning of August 4, 1892 business man Andrew Borden of Falls River, Massachusetts and his second wife Abby were murdered by multiple blows of a hatchet. Popular opinion always held that the murder weapon was wielded by Lizzie, Borden’s 22-year old spinster daughter, who discovered the body of her father.

Lizzie’s explanation of where she had been and what she was doing that morning were confused and contradictory, and her attitude aroused the suspicions of the police. She was seen destroying a dress that she claimed had been stained by paint; her answers and demeanour at the inquest led to her being charged with murder in December of that year. The trial during the following summer attracted national interest, especially after Lizzie was acquitted by the jury after a mere 90 minutes of deliberation. No one else was ever tried for the crime.

For the rest of their lives Lizzie and her sister Emma were the subjects of lurid fascination. Shunned by the good citizens of Fall River, they nonetheless remained in the town, living together for years and never marrying. In 1905 the sisters quarrelled and never reconciled. They both died in 1927 and were buried side by side.

Numerous movies, plays, and stories have been written about the murders, many suggesting possible solutions to the mystery. The best of them is a 1976 tv movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, starring Elizabeth McGovern, and a wonderful short story by Avram Davidson entitled “The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon”.

August 1

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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.

July 30

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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.

July 28

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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”.

July 28

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1794

The revolution eats its own children

It is an immutable law that revolutions are never carried out by a single group, but by a collection of various factions, each with a different goal other than simply overthrowing the existing order. It is also inevitable that revolutions become increasingly more radical, and, as they do so, they consume not just defenders of the old regime but also many of those who took a rebellious part in earlier stages of the struggle. Moderates find themselves targeted as enemies of the revolution and are repressed or killed. This radicalization will continue until eventually it becomes too oppressive and is brought to an end, exterminating the extremists, and taking a step backward.

So it was with the French Revolution. It began in the spring of 1789 with an alliance of middle-class reformers, working-class mobs, intellectuals, lawyers, and progressive clergy and nobles. Before the end of the year it had ended feudalism and aristocratic privilege, achieved a constitutional monarchy, and tamed the Catholic Church. This was not enough for many revolutionaries, however. By 1792 it had abolished the monarchy and created a republic; it had executed the royal family; it had turned anti-religious and explicitly anti-Christian; thousands of refugees had fled to Britain and neighbouring countries on the Continent. By 1793, France was at war with European monarchies as its leaders turned to Terror as an instrument of state policy.

In the words of Maximilien Robespierre, a leading Jacobin radical:

If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country … The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Victims of the Terror included prisoners in jails torn to pieces by mobs, boatloads of captives fired on by cannons, but mostly those who went in a stream to the execution machine set up the squares of most French cities. Nuns, priests, bourgeois, and former revolutionaries were beheaded by the guillotine after the flimsiest of trials. In 1794 a new law brought in by Robespierre and Antoine St-Just required the arrest of anyone on whom the slightest suspicion fell: “For a citizen to become suspect it is sufficient that rumour accuses him”. The new regulations denied the accused the right to counsel or any witnesses on their behalf; the only verdicts were acquittal or death. This new law also removed the immunity of Convention members from summary arrest, thus causing many politicians to feel threatened by the new system and by Robespierre and St-Just in particular. On July 27 (9 Thermidor on the new calendar) the Convention ordered the arrest of Robespierre and his clique. He attempted to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head with a pistol, but only succeeded in blowing off his jaw, causing him extreme pain. The next day, Robespierre, St-Just and 15 other radicals were guillotined without trial. With this so-called “Thermidorean Reaction” the Revolution became more conservative and less frightening.

July 24

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1967

“Vive le Québec Libre”

Every nation has things it does well, and those things it has proven incapable of doing. England, for example, excels at producing talented actors; its cuisine is execrable. Germany gives birth to wonderful musical composers, but it can’t keep its hands off its neighbours’ territory. Canada exports brilliant comedians but our best Shakespearean actor is William Shatner. And there is France — the land of great cheeses, gorgeous actresses, splendid 19th-century novelists, and baguettes — but it cannot follow an ethical foreign policy. The treachery of the French government is legendary. The examples of cooperation with Islamic pirates in the 16th century, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the abandonment of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, Marshal Pétain and Vichy, and the sabotage of The Rainbow Warrior give but a taste of the complete absence of gratitude or principle exhibited by the Quai d’Orsay.

In 1967 Canada celebrated the centenary of its independence, put on the stirring Expo 67 in Montreal, and invited world leaders to pay us a visit. Among those who came was President Charles de Gaulle of France. De Gaulle ignored diplomatic protocol which mandates flying directly to the nation’s capital; instead he arrived in Quebec City on board the French warship Colbert, named after the minister of Louis XIV whose policies saved New France in the 1600s. He then drove to Montreal where he gave a speech, the heart of which was his observation that his reception along the route reminded him of the liberation of France in 1944. He concluded by uttering the infamous phrase: Vive Montréal! Vive le Québec! Vive le Québec libre! Vive, vive, vive le Canada français! Et vive la France!” This backing of Quebec independence was a calculated blow which de Gaulle had planned. Speaking of himself in the third person, he had told an aide, “Of course, like many others I could have got away with a few polite remarks or diplomatic acrobatics, but when one is General De Gaulle, one does not have recourse to such expedients. What I did, I had to do it.”

The mild-mannered Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson furiously announced, “The people of Canada are free. Every province in Canada is free. Canadians do not need to be liberated. Indeed, many thousands of Canadians gave their lives in two world wars in the liberation of France and other European countries.” De Gaulle did not bother to continue his trip and flew home pleased with his attack on the sovereignty of an ally.

The bodies of 47,500 Canadian servicemen are buried in France where they died fighting for French liberty.

July 23

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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.